Hydrowilderness

Bryden Williams

Opening 04.05.16 6-8pm
Artist Talks 26.05.16 6-7pm

Hydro-Wilderness deals with the aesthetic and environmental implications of hydro-electric and water management infrastructures. Sydney based artist Bryden Williams questions the cultural and aesthetic integrities of both ecological and technological forces at play within the Australian environment through a new series of photographic, video and installation works centred around the infrastructural aspects of water management and hydro-electric facilities.

Various locations are interrogated through a documentarian photographic approach, featuring sites such as Sydney’s Warragamba catchment, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme and Victoria’s Kiewa Hydro-electric Scheme. The featured catchment areas are treated as site-specific studies of the natural and organic aesthetic attributes of water and the peripheral structures of containment – canals, dams and pipelines. Collectively, alongside video and installation elements, the work questions the integrities of both the functional and aesthetic properties of water-related systems. The hydro-dam becomes a site composed of elements in a compromised state – a ruptured natural space whereby concrete, steel and mechanical elements convert unaltered river flow into a managed commodity. Whilst each location retains a unique assembly of materials that allude by design to particular aspects of Australian engineering history, concrete, the building block of the dam, becomes a material pretense for Australia’s cultural identity.

Williams questions the potential of various man-made elements that are interacting with and manipulating our river systems whilst the exhibition represents a culmination of personal inquiries into water. The audience are encouraged to consider the aesthetic implications of local engineered spaces and to question the practicalities of water use.