TJ Bateson - Embedded Revisited

Wednesday 2 - Saturday 19 December 2020  

Click here for artwork by TJ Bateson  

20 Years - Still Looking.

In April 2018, the National Gallery of Victoria remounted The Field, its inaugural exhibition at its new premises on St Kilda Road of 50 years earlier. Controversial at the time, the restaging resulted in new audiences and rethinking of responses (as well as a whole number of related exhibitions around Melbourne). But it set a train of thoughts in motion as Tacit approached its 20th anniversary. 

The exhibition that launched the original Tacit was Embedded, a two-person show between TJ Bateson and Kerrilee Ninnis, co-founders of Tacit, and a response to the breakdown of their marriage. Separated at the time of the exhibition, the work looked at a sense of self in a changing relationship. For Bateson, it was about coming out as a gay male in a married context. Ninnis looked at the loss that’s carried when a relationship breaks down for orientational reasons and how they navigated that together. The result was a heartfelt and deeply personal photographic exhibition. 

That exhibition, along with new work revisiting the theme, was re-mounted in our Gipps St premises to celebrate the 20th anniversary. For the move to our new Johnston St premises, a revisiting a sense of self and include the new work created by Bateson is the focus. As the new venue evolves, so that sense of Bateson self is reflected in the new layout and intimate presentation of Tacit's move back to Johnston St.  

In doing so, the artist has carried forward a memory of process and the agency that fuelled the original works into a contemporary space. Like the rise in focus and interest of reductive and minimalist abstraction spawned by The Field Revisited at the NGV, Embedded Revisited readdresses photographic processes and its place within a digitally saturated world.