Two Australian artists – photo-based artist Allan Chawner and composer Andrew Chubb – collaborated to produce Bar Beach (Beyond the Sea), a mesmerising 3-channel video projection with original music. A sequence of still views, looking out over Bar Beach in the artists' hometown of Newcastle, Australia, fades from one image to another in a 20-minute meditation on time, change and memory. Chawner's photographs evoke, at first glance, the romantic conventions of the sea: the sublimity of oceanic forces and our yearning for the far horizon. Andrew Chubb's 20-minute composition for piano, Meditation at Bar Beach, opens a contemplative space for the viewer of a three-channel projection of successive still images, reflecting the subjective experience of being at Bar Beach. Closer examination introduces information that complicates this seemingly romantic reverie. Rather than carefree sailboats, the photographs show us ore carriers, vessels of a resource extraction economy, a site of environmental and economic exploitation. This is the ground against which the Australian surfer fantasy is enacted. The horizon starts to look more troubled, a threshold of capitalist exchange. This full-colour exhibition brochure includes a guest essay by Meryl Ryan, Curator of the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery in Booragul, Australia.

Robin Metcalfe has a prenatal affinity for Nova Scotia crafts — his mother met his father while she was teaching weaving in Glace Bay. Like most of the people profiled in Studio Rally, he is a self-employed cultural producer — a freelance writer and independent curator.

Robin Metcalfe's profile page

Meryl Ryan's profile page