I have come across a group exhibiton of abstract photography in Australia curated by Stella Loftus-Hills and Stephen Zagala at the Monash Art Gallery in Melbourne in 2012. It was entitled Photographic Abstractions, and it involved the work of 33 Australian photographers comprising over 200 photographs.
These range from modernist geometric abstraction and the psychedelic experiments and conceptual projects of the 1970s, through to recent explorations of pixelated pictorial space. The majority of works in the exhibition are held in the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection. There is little text and no catalogue online.
Some of the images of the exhibition can be seen on this post by Marcus Bunyan at Art Blart. He draws attention to the lack of a text that places the work in a socio-cultural context. All that is offered, he says, are five short paragraphs on a wall as you enter the space. Bunyan precises these thus:
*Photographic language engages the senses and challenges the way we "look" at the world;
*Through the use of cropping and obscure angles the familiar is made unfamiliar;
*Colour, shape and form (geometric patterns) are important;
*Some artists eliminate the camera altogether through photograms, scanner, collage;
*Use of multiple exposures, distortion, mirroring;
*By drilling down into the substances and processes of photography we can reflect on the very nature of photography itself;
*Exploring geometry and patterns found in nature and the built environment or alluding to more intangle themes such as time, mortality and spirituality.
Bunyan says that there was no serious theoretical inquiry or educational component offered to the viewer by the curators, even though Stephen Zagala, a Curator at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, is a writer with training in art history, philosophy and anthropology.
The artists are: Andrew Browne, John Cato, Jo Daniell, John Delacour, Peter Elliston, Joyce Evans, Chantel Faust, Susan Fereday, Anthony Figallo, George Gittoes, John Gollings, Graeme Hare, Melinda Harper, Paul Knight, Peter Lambropoulos, Bruno Leti, Anne MacDonald, David Moore, Grant Mudford, Harry Nankin, Ewa Narkiewicz, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Jozef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, Robert Owen, Wes Placek, Susan Purdy, Scott Redford, Jacky Redgate, Wolfgang Sievers, David Stephenson, Mark Strizic and Rick Wood.