Opening night: 6pm, Thursday 19 April: Perth Centre for Photography: 91, Brisbane Street, Perth.
Wastelands is a journey into abandoned and transitory spaces in Australia and Europe. Tolonen has explored spaces such as family fun parks in abandoned nuclear power stations creating large format images recording some of the unusual ways that buildings decline, and ways that space is reordered. Tolonen writes:
"Large format photography has had a long association with architecture and landscape. It expands detail, corrects perspective and allows almost infinite depth of field, satisfying our desires for topographical accuracy.
"I have always enjoyed the images of the New Topographers, like Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, who in the 1970s photographed the impact of suburbia encroaching on the frontier of the American West. Their images harboured a strange tension between banality and beauty.
"The New Topographers depicted the (dysfunctional) marriage between a young civilisation and an ancient landscape. What I feel I am doing is looking at landscape after the divorce. Some spaces fall to ruin, in others new unexpected relationships are formed.
"Commonly, defunct industrial landscapes are transformed into modern centres of consumption. But family fun parks in abandoned nuclear power stations and the prospect of a European wilderness in Chernobyl reveal that landscape is never a finished project, nor what we always expect.
"I do not want to cast these images simply as documents of particular spaces or countries; I also feel that there is an element of fantasy in them, sometimes dark, at other times playful. Large format photography tends to record more than we can actually see, compelling us to look longer. The matter of fact appearance is also its mystery."
Gallery hours: Thursday to Sunday -12-5pm.
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