TJ Bateson/Kerrilee Ninnis - 'Embedded Revisited'

Wednesday 4 - Sunday 29 March 2020

Click here for artwork by TJ Bateson 

20 Years - Still Looking.

In April 2018, the National Gallery of Victoria remounted The Field, its inaugural exhibition at its new premises on St Kilda Road of 50 years earlier. Controversial at the time, the restaging resulted in new audiences and rethinking of responses (as well as a whole number of related exhibitions around Melbourne). But it set a train of thoughts in motion as Tacit approached its 20th anniversary.

The exhibition that launched Tacit was Embedded, a two-person show between TJ Bateson and Kerrilee Ninnis, co-founders of Tacit, and a response to the breakdown of their marriage. Separated at the time of the exhibition, the work looked at a sense of self in a changing relationship. For Bateson, it was about coming out as a gay male in a married context. Ninnis looked at the loss that’s carried when a relationship breaks down for orientational reasons and how they navigated that together. The result was a heartfelt and deeply personal photographic exhibition.

Whilst re-mounting this exhibition, why not revisit a sense of self and include new work created over the last year from both artists? In doing so, the artists carried forward a memory of process and the agency that fuelled the original works into a contemporary space. Like the rise in focus and interest of reductive and minimalist abstraction spawned by The Field Revisited at the NGV, Embedded Revisited readdresses photographic processes and its place within a digitally saturated world.