'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine' at The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
26 August 2024
From 2 August – 27 October 2024, The Museum of Contemorary Art Australia presents 'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine'. Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights Sugimoto’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.
Employing a large-format camera and mixing his own darkroom chemicals, Sugimoto has often revisited ideas and practices from 19th-century photography, capturing subjects such as dioramas, wax figures and architecture. His work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium. For Sugimoto, photography is uniquely suited for preserving and picturing time’s passage, functioning as a form of time machine.
Through photography, sculpture, architecture and performance, Hiroshi Sugimoto manipulates the inexorable march of time and the vast mysteries of space, stalling the clock in order to create monumental forms from historically significant or fleetingly poetic moments. By approaching the artificial with an eye for the natural, in his realistic photographs of museum dioramas or waxworks, and vice versa, in his images of buildings or interiors that seem to melt all that is solid, Sugimoto proves his mastery as one of the world’s greatest artists and innovators of lens-based media. This concept-driven approach begins with the ideation of an image and is only completed upon the work’s execution, usually employing a large-format camera as his primary tool.
'Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine' is supported by Neilson Foundation, K&S Martin-Weber, Warwick Evans, Minyu Zhang and Toshiba International Foundation.
Find out more about the exhibition via The Museum of Contemorary Art Australia.
Image: Hiroshi Sugimoto, installation view, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2024, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © the artist, photograph: Zan Wimberley.
