Wilderness User
Paper Mountain Gallery, Northbridge
6th June – 21st June 2015
Featuring over 100 photographs, collages, paintings and drawings, Wilderness User made an intimate record of one artist’s exploration of six wilderness landscapes which cannot ordinarily be accessed by the casual tourist: Macquarie Island, Bouvet Island, the Moon, the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility, Barrow and Gangkhar Peunsum. These locations are isolated, impenetrable, climactically hostile and extreme. Making use of the concept of ‘disambiguation’, familiar in Wikipedia searches, the artist allows a sprawling online investigation into these places avalanche down the gallery wall.
Sheridan Coleman’s practice is dedicated to the chronicling of an unfolding historical convergence between landscape art and the surge in the everyday use of land-imaging technologies such as GPS, Google Earth and satellite photography. In Wilderness User, the artist proliferates a mass of playful work throughout her online journeys to remote landscapes in order to question the authenticity of her journey, the meaning of her engagement with land through a digital lens, and the concurrently tragedy and romance involved in digital wanderlust.
Wilderness User Catalogue with essay by Perth writer Emma Hussein
Photographs © 2015 Adam. D Mitchell
Dr. Sheridan Hart 