INVISIBLE HOUSE at DARK MOFO Tasmania featuring William Mortensen
13 – 24 June 2018, Hobarth, Tasmania, Australia.
Dark Mofo, Mona’s winter festival, delves into centuries old solstice rituals, exploring the links between ancient and contemporary mythology, humans and nature, religious and secular traditions, darkness and light, and birth, death and renewal.
Since inception in 2013, the festival has grown to attract over 400,000 attendances and more than 80,000 tickets sold to events last year.
curated by Brendan Walls
The program
BRENDAN WALLS
Medium: Sound, Altars, light, gorse, salt, field recordings, viola, percussion.
BARRY WILLIAM HALE/NOKO
Medium: Sound, Ink, blood, voice, ritual, trance.
WILLIAM MORTENSEN (From the collection of Stephen Romano)
(1897-1965)
Medium: Photography
SAK YANT with AJARN OHR
Medium: Sound, Needle, Ink, blood, voice, ritual.
HARRY SMITH
(1923-1991)
Medium: Light, celluloid, paint, dioramas, collage.
William Mortensen (1897 – 1965) was an American Photographer, primarily known for his Hollywood portraits in the 1920s-1940s in the pictorialist style.
Ansel Adams called him ‘the Antichrist’ and wanted him written out of history. But William Mortensen’s grotesque photographs of death, nudity and torture and are now having their day..
..Mortensen’s methods often made it hard to distinguish whether the results were photographs or not. He used traditional printmaking techniques, such as bromoiling, and developed many of his own techniques. He created composite images, scratch, scrape and draw on his prints, then apply a texture that made them look like etchings, thereby disguising his manipulations. Consequently, every print was unique. Ultimately, Mortensen’s aim was to create something that, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be a photograph, yet portrayed scenes so fantastic they caused wonder and astonishment in the viewer.
William Mortensen untitled work from 1924.
More on the artists at disinfo:
http://disinfo.com/2018/04/invisible-house-curated-brendan-walls-dark-mofo-2018/