Out of Sight: New Acquisitions

Out of Sight: New Acquisitions showcases works that have been added, through donation or purchase, to the Gallery’s permanent collection over the past three years, many of which are being exhibited for the first time. The exhibition centres on the recent donation of 81 photographs by Harold Edgerton, who has been credited with inventing ultra-high-speed, stroboscopic and stop-action photography to take pictures of events that occurred too quickly or slowly to be discerned by the human eye. Taking Edgerton’s remapping of the possibilities of space and time as a thematic starting point, Out of Sight explores artists’ engagement with ideas about perception and representation, challenging viewers to reconsider what we see in our everyday encounters.

Collectively, the artists in Out of Sight investigate the ambiguities of perception—the imperfect nature of what we see and experience—by creating enigmatic depictions that exist at the edge of representation and deliberately resist easy reading. From explorations of the limits of recognition to spatial constructions that defy the laws of perspective and question how time is represented and perceived, these works acknowledge the inadequacies of optical vision to fathom life at its most robust.

Artists include Richard Artschwager, Iain Baxter, Rebecca Brewer, Harold Edgerton, Gathie Falk, Monique Fouquet, Charles Gagnon, Graham Gillmore, Angela Grossmann, Holger Kalberg, Gary Lee-Nova, Euan Macdonald, Michael Morris, Eadweard Muybridge, Elspeth Pratt, Ryan Sluggett, Corin Sworn, Diana Thater, Robert Youds and Etienne Zack.