Art / after/image, Brenda L Croft. At The Goulburn Regional Art Gallery until April 4. Reviewed by BARRINA SOUTH

Brenda L Croft’s current show after/image, once again, reflects her art practice focused on family, place and contested histories.

Croft has assembled at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, a visual series of artworks that explores her matrilineal heritage, focused on her great grandmother, a non-Aboriginal woman and her connection to the Goulburn area. The exhibition constructs places and landscape using still and moving images.

Through the artworks Croft explores sites connected to her family and urges the gallery visitor to think about memory/loss, and how all of us have layered histories. This is achieved with the various mediums used to convey these themes, the haunting large stunning tintypes photographs, collections of old slides from family holidays and an audio visual component, reinforces the layers of both Country and histories.

There is a quietness, a stillness to the artworks which allows the gallery visitor to contemplate one’s own family. In this stillness I was drawn to the artwork Weereewa (Lake George) tree II. The photographic technic and subject matter are powerful in inviting the gallery visitor to slow down and really take in the image. I was drawn to this image because I often find myself as I drive across the landscape imagining what some of our old trees have had bear witness to.

For me, after walking around the exhibition, on the drive back to Canberra I was moved to take a detour and stopped at the Weerewa lookout to take in the landscape. This is a great example of how art moves the gallery visitor to take their learning from the gallery walls and adopt a new way of thinking into our lives.

In this show, Croft had taken a different approach. Her past exhibitions where she has focused on family, re/memory and connection, she has visually place herself in the exhibition. Images of Croft are present in after/image in family slides alongside siblings and her mum and dad.

Croft is very much present in the catalogue and the gallery visitor get an opportunity to understand Croft’s questioning of herself and us when she poses the question: Who remembers those who are no longer here?