Desert Obsession Catalogue

Desert Obsession

TOBY SCOTT

Desert Obsession is the first solo exhibition by prominent interiors and architecture photographer Toby Scott.

Part photo essay, part photo album, and part fine-art photography this new series of images offers personal glimpses of both mundane and awe-inspiring beauty captured on a recent solo journey across the Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert (on Wangkangurru Yarluyandi and Lower Arrente lands).

Rippled sand dunes, big skies, wispy spinifex, and salt pans coalesce with roads chiselled in red dirt and deserted interiors to provide a vision of the desert that is intimate, open, and unfixed; where form and fantasy merge to produce an ode to ‘the desert’ as both a place and an idea.

Desert Blur 1, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Desert Blur 2, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Desert Garden, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Santa Terresa Horse, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Sand Textures, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Orange Chair, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Afternoons in the Desert, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Desert Track, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large

Andado Table, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Drifting Dune, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Contours, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small & Medium

Andado Shadows, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Salt Pan 1, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small & Medium

Salt Pan 2, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small & Medium

Hot Spring Stairs, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Green Chairs, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Kitchen Sink, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Desert Carpet, 2022, photographic print on Canson 100% cotton rag. Available in the following print sizes; Small, Medium & Large

Desert Forms and Fantasies

By Sally Molloy

Even if one has never been to the desert, one finds that one’s mind is full of images of the desert. These mental images are not solid but shifting, shimmering in tone and colour depending on how determinedly one is able to narrow in, depending upon one’s standpoint, and depending on the particular cascade of imagery that one has absorbed over the course of one’s life. My particular desert atlas is informed by the kaleidoscopic beauty of paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye: paintings of Alhalkere (her country) and ‘the whole lot’ (her dreaming). These sit beside Sidney Nolan’s Central Australia (1950), painted after Nolan's experience of flying over inland Australia accompanying mail runs to remote settlements (knuckles of red and brown as far as the eye could see). Nolan’s dried, decaying, and petrified cow carcasses (shot in rural Queensland and the Northern Territory during the severe drought of the early fifties) arrest my breath while Desert Dust Storm, Tibooburra (1967) by Fred Williams—creamy and pearlescent—soothes my nerves. And while Arthur Boyd’s bevy of brides, ‘half-castes’, and nebuchadnezzars contort in paddocks and pools, Russell Drysdale’s Shopping Day (1957) reminds me that all through this country, First Nations peoples survived and adapted to colonisation even as monuments to empire watched over them from the centres of red and dusty towns.

It's not just art history that maintains these mental images of the desert, these mirages rich and varied; it’s also the stories, such as Patrick White’s Voss (1957). Based on the life of Ludwig Leichhardt who disappeared while voyaging to the desert in the early nineteenth century, the story focusses on the cross-continental expedition of Johann Ulrich Voss, an explorer who “sees his journey into the desert as both a physical and a psychic excursion into the unknown…a journey to the depths of the soul”. For Voss, this journey is fraught with drama, dilemmas, and disasters, and eventually he 1 perishes and his spirit enters the desert (he is at one with nature). But before this happens, the desert provides a backdrop or a stage upon which Voss can test and discover himself, commune with spirits, and reconcile with his own mortality. The desert becomes an abstraction of sorts.

At the heart of Desert Obsession—Toby Scott’s first solo offering after fifteen years working as a wellknown architecture and interiors photographer—there is a voyage of similar magnitude. In the first instance, this collection might act as a record of Scott’s recent solo journey across the Munga-ThirriSimpson Desert (on Wangkangurru Yarluyandi and Lower Southern Arrernte lands), a much anticipated and meticulously planned expedition which saw Scott traverse 5,500 kilometres of rugged inland terrain in his trusty ute “Rocky”. The visual outcomes of this experience offer a personal photo album or a visual ode to the desert as a landscape that holds much fascination and intrigue for the artist. Visions of rippled sand dunes, big skies, wispy spinifex, hot springs, and salt pans jostle with sun-bleached plastic chairs, shadows playing on crackled concrete, roads chiselled in red dirt, and a ceramic swan sitting on a doily.

Shirley Paolini, “Desert Metaphors and Self-Enlightenment in Patrick White’s ‘Voss’,” Antipodes 4, no. 1 2 (1990): 87-89.

The images are playful yet solemn, and through their ability to both use and refuse the clichés of nature photography the collection invites us to contemplate the desert as a discursive bundle of ideas, projections, and conventions.

Reminders of photography’s status as a light-based (rather than a pigment-based) medium echo throughout Desert Obsession like a gentle ostinato: shadows playing here, jagged blades of light peeking under doors there, pools of luminescence almost meet while barely visible shapes emerge out of the depths of darkness. Via Scott’s lens, the desert is quiet and intimate one minute, vast and operatic the next. And this is no accident. Details of Scott’s process reveal that these pictures are not merely traces of found things or things that happened, but deliberately constructed visions, pictures that were made. As Susan Sontag suggests, a photograph “is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame”. While Santa Teresa Horse throws technical mastery to the wind in a 1 desperate panic to capture a fleeting cinematic moment, Desert Blur reveals the artist’s mechanical experimentations with time and movement. Salt Pans captures from the sky the patterns left behind by skids and wheelies while the everyday objects in Andado Table transcend their ordinariness and become visual components of a dynamic composition. Here the lines, colours, shapes, and textures toy with each other in specific ways because of Scott’s perspective. And in fact, this is perhaps the most compelling aspect of this exhibition. While the desert voyage offered Scott the freedom to play and to respond to an emergent and discursive collection of subject matters, the ensuing collection reveals something fundamental to Scott’s practice more broadly speaking: a devotion to form. Whether through images of architectural marvels, paddocks of sorghum and oats, vintage automobiles, a soft-boiled egg, or these powerful and poetic images of the desert, Scott’s photographs remind us that if you look from the right angle (and in just the right light) form (and fantasy) is all around us.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books Limited, 2011) 39.

Special thanks to all who assisted in putting this exhibiton together; Franca Design Loupe Imaging The Total Picture Framing Monocera Wineism

Fino Foods

Thanks for the continued support Laura, Sally, John, Nina, Shane, Steve, Deb & the Fam.

toby@tobyscott.com.au