Suburban noir

This exhibition breaks with the tradition of presenting Sydney as a visual splendour, finding instead a more reserved city.

The police photographs capture the spaces left behind: a moody catalogue of vacant lots, empty roads, desolate interiors and everyday fragments of life in these hard-bitten slices of Sydney. Look at these images long enough and everything starts to look like a crime scene. Guest curator Peter Doyle invited a group of visual artists to loan existing works or create new works in response to the forensic photographs. They have responded with diverse visual sensitivities and understanding, finding drama and tragedy but also surprising stateliness and dramatic beauty. The artists are Vanessa Berry, Dallas Bray, Rhett Brewer, Charles Cooper, Theresa Darmody, Di Holdsworth, Bruce Latimer, Michael Lewy, Frank Littler, Reg Mombassa, Peter O’Doherty, Ken Searle, Susannah Thorne and Anne Wallace.