The Crying of Lot 63

Abstract

On an undeveloped section of land in Glen Innes, located on the corner of Taniwha and Estree Streets, lies Lot 63. The section has a multi-layered history – containing optimism and re-growth, institutionalization and twists of fate, violence and neglect. After World War II, when Glen Innes emerged as a community focused on reintegrating returning soldiers to civilian life and building families, Lot 63, was turned into a school. Part of the post-war government’s social policy to ensure all children had access to an education, Lot 63 occupied a valued position in the community for five decades. But populations change, governments change, and with them social policies. Educational resources were pooled within the co-ed school across the road and the old school was deemed superfluous to the community and closed in the 1990s. Before the buildings on Lot 63 could be redeveloped, three high school students from the co-ed school across the road decided to use the abandoned structures to escape exams and smoke cigarettes. A fire caught light in the old gymnasium, burning it to the ground. The smoke-damaged school buildings were later erased from the site. Nowadays, a variety of people access the section for alternate uses: a place to walk the dog; a shortcut to the co-ed school, the local shops and pool. When night falls, hidden sightlines and poor lighting can sometimes screen acts of violence. For one year, I was one of Lot 63’s momentary visitors, photographing and documenting the site. In the process of transcribing the social landscape through image-making, Lot 63 was both constructed and fragmented. A sense of present time and constructed space was revealed as an accumulation of past experiences. At the same time, decontextualizing the physical site created a new space in which time, location and social context was manufactured. A universal space was created, drifting through time. My project evolved from cinema’s film frames and the still film camera. The photographs are pauses in the flow of the cinematic. The intrinsic gaps and ruptures between the still images allow the photo-sequence to be allusive and tangential. In these ruptures the relationship between image and cinematic time is released from the momentum of movement, restructured by texture, scale, focus, depth of field and tonal qualities. The created space becomes a simulated environment, inviting viewers to add themselves and locate their own narrative. In the assembly of shots, the filmic qualities of montage emphasize the partial, fragmented nature of a story and the section – Lot 63 – in which it is played out.