Between real and surreal

It’s difficult to make out where fiction and fact separate in the photographs of Kate Ballis on show at GallerySmith in Abbotsford St.

In Joshua Tree, what looks like a canyon or a desert hang-out for cowboys, is printed in lurid colours. 

Everything is pink, blue or purple in the world Ballis creates. 

The photographs have just been hung and they have a fresh look, perhaps a feature of the post-COVID desire to escape restrictions.

The green is all blue and the rest pink. Palm trees cry out for birds of paradise or pink flamingos, but all is still, like a stage set.

The names are clues to the preoccupations of the artist. One photograph called Poodle has fluffy, groomed trees.

Succulent depicts a bunker-style modernist home, a mackerel sky and tall palm trees that is uplifting through its simplicity.

Infra-Realism: Lilac Lux is an exhibition of 11 photographs done in 2020 which build on a series by the photographer based in Palm Springs where she lives part of the time.

Ballis worked as an assistant to British fashion photographer and artist, Miles Aldridge, and the staged nature of her photographs are reminiscent of a fashion shoot.

She exhibited works from the Infra-Realism series at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in 2019, attracting an analysis of her fictional methods by curators. 

According to CCP, her visits to Palm Springs and resulting familiarity with the desert and retro-urban landscape have culminated in her vivid new interpretation of the site.  

“The works are placed somewhere between reality and the surreal; lucid dreamscapes which are familiar in form, yet subvert the usual colour and scale we rely on to interpret the visions around us.”

The works are shot using a converted digital infrared camera with lens filters and subvert a technique that infrared photographers often use to make photos “more realistic”. 

These aim, instead, for the other end of the spectrum, not fantasy but strangeness.

“Healthy plants emit infrared light, and through my viewfinder I can see a glowing world that makes plants pop out from their surrounds,” Ballis told CCP.

Texture is augmented using this method, somehow overcoming the flat glossy nature of the usual surfaces.

Infra Realism also offers a never-before-seen take on some of North America’s most iconic destinations, according to CCP.

A barren landscape can become a lush oasis, where succulents and palm trees thrive, through Ballis’s lens. 

“And synthetic grass can be identified through the viewfinder and revealed for all to see.”

Infra-Realism: Lilac Lux, Kate Ballis, GallerySmith, until April 24 •