Untitled Monuments

CATALOGUE ESSAY by ANDREW HARPER 2025

This is not the place.

This is not any real place, but it looks like one. Your eyes tell you this image is a sunset across the bay, which it is, but this image is also paper and light, with the steam from a chunk of dry ice creating punctuation for a vernacular of land, of sea and sky. This is a language of images.

Rosie Hastie’s photography demonstrates her internalised and instinctual understanding of this visual language. She knows that the paragraphs of the sky are intrinsic components of the essay that is the image; how the grammar of light creates a formal structure. She breaks down each component: sentences are formed from prepositions, nouns, verbs, adjectives: all in the correct order.

Rosie’s art understands how digital photography functions. She is able to control light’s play; make it central.

Her images investigate what light does. This began when one small, modest light, playing upon a small notebook, produced an image which so strongly resembled a horizon that people saw it was one, surprised when the truth was revealed. This became a significant academic investigation, and Rosie’s art unfurled. She found light; investigated textures: saw how certain forms and materials interact, how two things may be black but seem different under a specific light. She started with almost nothing and allowed that to lead her to complex places, seeing the structure under the image.

Although.

This is not that place; there is no place.

There is light, paper and mist, all contained. Rosie builds a world, a tiny one, and makes it vast: she knows exactly what vast looks like and can make something look as big as coastline that stretches out into a fog. It’s gorgeous, and it is deceptive; it is satire and comment. In Lutruwita/Tasmania, where Rosie lives and makes her work, the images of landscape are everywhere. You see them on postcards and calendars. They are so often all the same, as if at some point it was decided that this is what these places will look like: the shades of green are these; the light is only at this time of day; a slow-repeating chorus that cannot end. Rosie sees these images and renders them down to components; she performs analysis, looks at each individual segment and re -creates it, makes it again from paper and light, and it looks pretty much the same, except these images have no connection to a place at all: they just look like the image you saw in a tourist brochure, and you understand that is a vernacular too, a grammar, a way of making an image, and perhaps, that place in also not real. Not the real place.

It just looks like it.

Rosie makes new images that ask what images are. She asks what they are used for. She wonders if it is reasonable that this happens. She shows you something gorgeous, and it is gorgeous, but why is it gorgeous?

Is it the place?

It’s just that there is no place.