MGA - Louis Porter's "Art"

MGA - Louis Porter:
Australian colour


Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 8 August 2009
To be opened by
Dr Shaune Lakin, Director MGA
Exhibition dates: 5 August – 13 September 2009

The art work/photography Louis showcased was from Altona to Hoppers Crossing, Deer Park to Thornbury, he traversed the urban landscape of greater Melbourne and Victoria, capturing colourful and uncanny moments with his camera. These moments could simply be passed of by the untainted eye as being arbitrary photos being taken by an amateur. What makes these photographs so special is the colour and composition, and the changing of viewers perception of his/her surroundings. Louis did this in a unique way, in that he used flash on a subject the had almost or full sunlight in it, plus he used over saturated film which gave a cereal spectrum of colour.

Australian colour presented his series of ink-jet prints, individually titled after the places where each image was shot. Exploring the character ofcontemporary Australia in the context of parking lots, industrial estates,
shopping precincts and residential cul-de-sacs, Porter’s photographs reimagined our everyday environment as a dreamscape, full of quirky possibilities and kooky coincidences.

Porter has described these works as “portraying familiar scenes that just
aren’t right”. With reference to colour and composition.
Louis said this about his work and method: photography is a “Version of realism and not the real thing” and in saying this he added further say that “he used over saturated colour to push the seeming real photos into an other dimension.

As a recent immigrant to Australia, Porter’s photographs might be thought of as the visual diary of someone exploring a strange new land. As such, he is
able to draw our attention to things that might otherwise go by unnoticed.

The photographs describe his route and take the viewer on a journey that is punctuated by colourful encounters with the everyday. His pace is pedestrian
and his viewpoint is street-level, but his sense of imagination is supernatural.

In North Fitzroy (2008) the green bonnet of an iconic Aussie muscle car nuzzles into a flourish of garden shrubbery. It’s a strange collision of opposites, which somehow finds harmony in the vivid green that traverses the organic and the machine-made surfaces.











Another Image that caught my eye was Terang (2008) the vivid orange and yellow shop front and bold type, collaborating with the space in front, that space being filled with the hard grey concrete and metal railing give the overall competition a solid structure. Along with this, is the centred type and sign writing witch has a harmony with Melbourne its self with its various laws and regulations with regards to owning a shop of this description, that “FEED PEOPLE CHEAP”.





Louis Porter was born in the north of England in 1977 and has been based in Melbourne, Australia since 2001. His work has been exhibited in
Australia, England , Canada and Austria.

This exhibition was in stark contrast with the Roger Ballen exhibition. What impressed me most about Louis is how he made art out of the mundane, and gave colour a new meaning to artistic photography.

So Louis my friend Rock On!!