Jane Burton
The Royal Derwent Hospital Suite 4 1997
type C photograph
75 x 75 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Survey exhibitions have the effect of revealing the persistent currents in an artist’s body of work as much as they demonstrate the radical changes and nuanced shifts that give personality to an established practice. The Glen Eira City Council Gallery’s Eye of the Beholder, an exhibition of Jane Burton’s photographs taken over the last two decades and gathered together by curator Diane Soumilas, is no exception. This exhibition has been vaunted as a celebration of Burton’s ongoing exploration of sensuality and female sexuality, her contribution to the imagining of rural Australian landscapes as sublime and her debt to cinematic – in particular noir – and Australian Gothic literary and visual traditions.¹ But Eye of the Beholder is, above all, a manifestation of Burton’s pervasive recourse to repeat images and ideas. What, over time and across disjointed viewings of individual photographs or separate bodies of work, might be experienced as instances of the artist’s persistent interest in mirroring, doubling and echoic forms of composition becomes, via this survey exhibition, an awakening to her obsession with these forms. Despite the important changes that can be observed in Burton’s twenty-year practice, through all the apparent shifts in focus and the experimentations with new technology, collected together her photographs seem to inhabit their own psychic topography and reveal a compulsion to return to specific emotional terrain.

Jane Burton
Cul-de-Sac 8 2000
type C photograph
120 x 120 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

This compulsion has been, and continues to be, an abundantly productive one. And Soumilas’ exhibition provides ample opportunities to observe the fertile energies of repetition, drawing together a comprehensive range of Burton’s photographs from her art-school days in 1989, through her principally analogue-based practice to her early experiments with Photoshop begun with the Cul-de-Sac series from 2000, right through to her most recent series, Ivy 2009.

Two principal forms of repetition recur in Eye of the Beholder. Each allows for multiple (repeated) variations within a series and for conversations to emerge between otherwise temporally distant and, at least superficially, distinct photographs. Firstly, there are photographs that gain potency in combination with others. For instance, Available Light 5 and Available Light 9 2003, The Fall 1 and The Fall 14 2004, along with Parking Stations No. 1 and No. 2 1998, repeat the female form. Seen together, they offer a powerful comment upon some of the fixed sexual roles available to women. In this, Burton’s work aligns itself with that of other women photographers such as Cindy Sherman, whose iconic Film Stills similarly, and repetitively, re-present the female figure in the various, but always constrained, personalities she has been allowed to assume in cinema.

Jane Burton
Badlands 4 2001
type C photograph
110 x 110 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

But there are also, from my point of view more interesting photographs that stage their own, inherent repetitions: Burton’s mirrored women in The Sweetest Path 10 1999 and The Other Side 2 2002-3; her congenitally twinned objects – Telstra phone booths in The Other Side 11 2002-3 and the furnishings of clinical interiors in The Royal Derwent Hospital series 1997; and the buildings, often located in rural landscapes, that appear to withhold a precious echo of their own, indeed, of themselves. This is seen in the eerily deserted, near-symmetrical dwellings of Cul-de-Sac 8 2000, Badlands 1 2001, Motherland 3 2008 and also in Ivy 1 2009, in which each half of an uncannily symmetrical house exactly mirrors the other, with only a stray cloud to the right of its pitched roof giving a moment’s relief to this unnatural equilibrium. Again, natural landscapes tender their own echo in the sundered cliffs of Cul-de-Sac 6 2000, the tree-top that finds its reflection in the exposed knot of its own roots in Badlands 4 2001 and in a small girl, white against the dark withered earth – Miranda, re-imagined, harkening to the siren song of Hanging Rock – who answers the form of another tree in Motherland 8 2008. I could go on.

Jane Burton
Motherland 8 2008
type C photograph
75 x 75 cm
courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

It is these interior echoes, the ones that resound within the frame of the photographic image, that most successfully capture the uncanny quality present in the whole of Burton’s body of work. They present the familiar and return the (also familiar) repressed. They picture the domestic and disclose its desolation. Burtonâ’s repeated staging of these imaginative compositions can be viewed as a repetitive acting-out that, if we believe Freud, is in turn a form of remembering.² During a visit to Eye of the Beholder, it became for me a form of remembering that in its turn grew into a kind of itinerary as I retraced my steps, returning to earlier photographs as I found, again and again, their echo elsewhere.

Jane Burton
Eye of the Beholder – Survey Exhibition
24 September – 18 October 2009
Glen Eira City Gallery, Melbourne

¹ See Diane Soumilas, ‘Private Encounters’ and Helen McDonald, ‘Inhabiting Illusions’ in Jane Burton: Eye of the Beholder, Glen Eira City Council, Caulfield South, 2009.
² See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, Penguin Books, London, 2003; ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, both in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, Penguin Books, London, 2003.