born 1957, Brisbane, Australia

In the same way that karaoke allows would-be singers to personalize and interpret songs within its compositional restraints, Gary Carsley creates his 'draguerrotypes'. His subject however is not popular song, it is the subject itself.

His seemingly photographic works depict intarsia wich in its turn depict culturally and historically significant parks and other scenery. But when we look at the images carefully, not only do we see that they are not in fact photographs, but also that the level of craftmanschip that would be required to achieve this much detail on such a scale is almost inhuman.

The works seem to be trying to convey an uncertainty about it's subject. It raises questions about the proces of making a photo, a framed fracture of reality, of a piece of craftmanship (the intarsia), wich in itself is a mimicry of a park(both in material and subject). The park in its turn is an artificially constructed landscape.

But Carsley goes even further down the rabbit hole of frabricated reality when we realize that his images stem from an assortment of images on his laptop. Using his collection of photographs of parks and of timber surfaces he creates a layered image that consist solely of woodgrains in the shape of a park. When the object of his images dissapears from reality, the images become objects themselves. In other words, Carsley's images create their own authenticity by obscuring and even removing its supposed origins.

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