Daniel Shea, Untitled and Untitled from Devil’s Lake, 2016.

The best thing about the exhibition Shadows are Cast by Things and People is that you don’t really need to know the facts.

If you think for a moment about a shadow, it’s most commonly thought of as that murky shape shifting alongside us. It’s elusive, never the same, constantly morphing and changing.  

This evasive shape also has a more poetic side – one that speaks to the memories and traces left behind from stories and history.

Artists Irina Rozovsky, Jordan Madge, Daniel Shea and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa record these traces in Australian Centre for Photography’s current exhibition Shadows are Cast by Things and People.  

The beauty of this exhibition lies in how effectively it captures this nature of shadows through photography. Their meanings and ideas are not fixed, oscillating somewhere between fact and fiction using documentary photography to investigate ideas of truth and reality in the visual image.

Jordan Madge, Untitled and Untitled from Red Herring, 2016.

Inspired by the disappearance of a girl in central Victoria, Jordan Madge uses a patchwork of seemingly unrelated photos to create his own version of the story. From the clearing in a leafy forest to the cartoon cowboy holding a beer, the urge to decipher and connect the clues is exciting and very Nancy Drew, yet ultimately we’re left to speculate.

We inch a little closer to facts in Daniel Shea and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s collaboration. Some of their photographs overlap one on top of the other, a crossing over of allegorical shadows in an attempt to address the violence of white male patriarchy.  

The photographs are rewarding, as while the accompanying text from the artists enriches your journey through the exhibition, you don’t need them – nor do you have to understand what you see. The stream of ambiguous references, hidden traces and inconclusive moments all invite us to enter into our own fiction and piece together our own stories, leaving with the feeling of having played a part in the narrative.

WHAT: ‘Shadows are cast by things and people’
WHEN: 19 May – 8 July 2017
WHERE: ACP Project Space Gallery, 72 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst
HOW MUCH: Free – more info here