LEISURELAND
1999
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
6 – 30 October 1999
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
3 – 20 May 2000
Monash Gallery of Art
6 September – 20 October 2002
Sporting Life , Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
16 August – 13 November 2000
My City of Sydney
20 November 2004 – 26 November 2006
New Australiana, regional tour
3 December – 20 April 2003
Photographica Australis, Sala del Canal de Isabel II, Madrid
15 February – 10 April 2002
Photographica Australis , Asialink tour
30 July, 2003 – 2004
De Overkant/ Down Under, The Haag Museum of Photography
15 June – 9 September 2007
Embassy of Australia
28 September – 15 November 2007
works
overview
An examination of modern Australian leisure.
Anne Zahalka’s series, Leisureland maps some of the co-ordinates of modern leisure in images that occupy a vantage point between the production and consumption of down time. Her photographs document the stuff we do; the myriad forms of gambling, sightseeing in the air, underwater, in the past, hardening our bodies in gyms, crowding a lecture by Derrida, chilling at the pool, catching a simulated war or a round of Aqua Golf, ‘Golf, with a difference!’
– EXCERPT FROM ESSAY BY DAVID ELLISON
Through a series of large scale photographic images taken in real locations “Zahalka’s images deploy conventions of photographic realism in tandem with contemporary technologies that facilitate a precision of colour and detail, an organisation of pictorial surface, and a scale hitherto associated with traditional history painting or the advertising billboard”.