Multi-disciplinary artist and photographer Samuel Hodge is opening his new exhibition, The Golden Promise, tonight at ALASKA Projects, Sydney’s inner-city arts hub located in the harbour-side suburb of Elizabeth Bay.
With three book publications up his sleeve, and art shows ranging from Auckland to Amsterdam, Samuel Hodge returns to his roots in Sydney for The Golden Promise. In The Golden Promise Hodge combines his heavily-altered 35mm film photographs with found slides to evoke imagery of histories that never happened, exploring the malleable nature of memory.
Hodge uses slides from the 1960s as well as analogue self-portraits to set the works somewhere around 1969 in the fictitious Smalltown, USA. Establishing this narrative setting, he constructs an alternate reality that reaches into the present. Speaking of his inspiration, Hodge says:
“I began looking at ideas of extracting memory; of how one’s memories are reconstructed and are fluid.”
Hodge self-published his first book, Truth / Beauty / Cock, in 2005 and his second, Sometimes I Just Need Quiet, in 2008. His third book, Pretty Telling I Suppose, was published with Rainoff Books in 2009. Hodge’s work exists somewhere in the grey area between photography and fine art, often integrating the best of both worlds. Throughout Hodge’s career he has incorporated photography, craft and textiles into his practice, often experimenting with dye, clay, beads, silk, paper and text to achieve the desired aesthetic.
The slides that appear in The Golden Promise were sourced from a thrift store in Brooklyn. Hodge united these with images from his own collection of unused work.
The Golden Promise opens tonight at 6pm and the exhibition will run until the 15th of February at ALASKA Projects, Level 2, Kings Cross Car Park, 9A Elizabeth Bay Road, Elizabeth Bay.