INTERNAL/EXTERNAL/INGUINAL

Kylie Ruszczynski photographs herself. She performs for the camera, both revealing and concealing herself for us, the beholders of her work.

In these works her figure appears for us from the depths of dark, often deep black tones. The figure is layered in ambiguous spaces between the mottled grey grid of the small tiles of a shower stall in the background, and the shadow of inguinal ultrasound scans that cover and lie over the surface of the figure.

The ultrasound scans are otherworldly; they sit within the photographic space like projections from another light source. They are, in fact, images of another world: the interior of the body; and, like maps, they are images of things that cannot themselves be seen. Of them she has said that they are "…floating almost landscape-like ripples of the flesh draped over the body as garments." Their significance, reference and meaning shifts and turns, almost under our eyes. Many of the scans incorporate text, bold black letters that promise - but withhold - more clarity; sometimes they spell part of her name, or refer to the orientation of the scan to her body, but often they are records of technical aspects of the scanning process that are opaque to the non-specialist viewer. Finally the scans are obscure fragments. They mark her photographs as puzzles: what are we seeing in, or seeing through these traces?

Within these layered spaces the figure is posed for the camera with almost Baroque theatricality. The figure is nude, but it is often posed with arms and hands shielding parts of the body, often the breasts or groin. In the latter case the pose is that of the classical Venus Pudica, where the hand both conceals and draws attention to What it conceals. In such ways the knowing poses of the figure continually assert the tropes of concealment and revelation that the ambiguous layering of photographic space establishes. And the figure rarely meets the gaze of the beholder. It is hard for the beholder to meet the gaze of the figure because typically in these photographs the light falls on the lower torso. Not only is the face often in shadow, obscured or masked, but also its eyes are resolutely directed somewhere else. Surely this must be an inward gaze: it might be merely thoughtful, or it might signify an ecstatic revelation, but only for the vision from within. Whatever she sees – or knows - is withheld from us.

As if to emphasise the elusiveness of the figure and its corporeal absence, the photographs themselves have an obdurate physical presence as objects. They are not made with digital processes; all have been made in a wet darkroom, and printed on creamy, old, and rare, photographic paper. Some of the prints are solarised, which both makes the outlines of the figure doubly ambiguous and emphatically asserts the necessary presence of the hand of the maker in their production. They are weighty, material things.

The beholder is played with and trapped by these performative images, almost glued to their surfaces as they circle from revelation to concealment. The images turn the inside out, and they shift and elude us while holding us close. They present conundrums that are fundamental to contemporary understandings of the medium of photography, just as they are models for our desire and our flawed capacity to fully understand beings other than ourselves.

"Gordon Bull

Head, Art Theory Workshop

The Australian National University, School of Art"

Kylie Ruszczynski

www.krportraits.org/

www.instagram.com/k.ruszczynski/