Photography/Between What Remains, Hilary Wardhaugh and David Manley. At Belconnen Arts Centre, until May 17. Reviewed by BRIAN ROPE.

The 2024 Canberra City News Artist of the Year, Hilary Wardhaugh, has again produced a wonderful collection of artworks – this time for a joint exhibition with a friend from their teenage years in Belconnen.

David Manley has also contributed great imagery. And they complement each other.

Between What Remains reflects on the lives of the two artists – once intimately connected and now forever interwoven through friendship and shared artistic vision. The two artists have come together in this exhibition to present conceptually aligned bodies of work.

Manley’s work photographically explores architectural models and historical sites that have been marked by violence. The profound influence past events and experiences have on the present and future of individuals and societies, the overwhelming nature of media in our lives today, and the rapid, decisive and forceful application of actions underpin his constructed trauma-scapes. In those quiet, speculative spaces, memories linger and collapse into the present.

Wardhaugh’s series The Disconnect also inhabits the territory of temporal rupture, but from a post-documentary urban landscape perspective. Exploring disconnection and the categorisation of the natural world in our urban landscapes, the work uses visual portrayals to contemplate puzzling things.

Curator Alexander Boynes has provided a wonderful essay about the exhibition in the catalogue. He suggests that this reunion of the two artists in a renewed dialogue is shaped by their shared beginnings in Belconnen, the home of the arts centre hosting this excellent show. Both of their developed photography practices have led to them viewing landscapes and architecture as sites of memory, rupture and return not simply as subjects.

It is not easy to select stand out images as all works are of equal interest. They draw us in to stand before them, first looking closely at the elements contained in them, then thinking about the messages they are intended to convey.

Manley’s High Rise shows us a huge concrete edifice improbably hovering high over the surface below. We wonder how it could possibly have moved into that position, apparently weightless despite its size and composition. We wonder how it could be so light as to float there.

Wardhaugh’s pieces are diverse, but also complementary. Her landscapes reveal terrains that have been significantly impacted by environmental stress and by decisions made, or not made, by those responsible for particular locations. In The Life of a roadside bush, the bush is a lone piece of nature in urban Queanbeyan’s concrete surroundings.

Both artists have effectively used the cathartic power of image-making in a world marked by the human cost of disconnection, ambivalence and disruption.