Uprising – Neville Cichon

The 6-week season at Sauerbier House Culture Exchange, Port Noarlunga, South Australia has now closed.

A small selection of the works are displayed above. I am now seeking opportunities to show some of this work at other venues.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The signs are emerging. The ocean and all within it break their silence on the unsustainable human impacts they have endured.

As a photographer whose practice focuses on climate impacts Neville Cichon invites you to consider the motivations behind an imagined protest emerging from the ocean., offering humans the opportunity to hear and bear witness to the voice of the ocean and all its inhabitants, as they loudly and visibly respond to decades of mistreatment.

Like the pre-COVID climate demonstrations that were building momentum pre, Cichon offers work like Face off, Rally and Uprising in an effort to represent the voice of marine life (albeit with a splash of humour) by playing on the evident resourcefulness developed by marine life, reflected through the generalised repurposing of litter, discarded household and recreational beach objects.

Through video, installation and image Cichon presents the confronting familiarity of the ocean alongside a confronting compilation of devastating human impacts. Not all doom and gloom, Uprising brings to light the fact that the ocean does have allies in this ongoing fight, and like the waters are rising, the people are now rising too.

Best viewed in full screen with sound. 2min16sec

Special thanks to long time collaborators of mine, the Bowden Print Group and Prolab Imaging for supporting the Uprising exhibition.

I would also like to acknowledge the host of my Artist Residency, the Tanks Arts Centre Cairns and the wonderful Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville. Both of which I visited in September 2020 and were important partners in the development of this body of work.