Kim Lehman

Tales from Hyperreality

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Introduction

The Tales from Hyperreality images explore Australia’s relationships with the history of the old world. Each image is an amalgam of a location from UK or continental Europe and a sky from Tasmania. Each also includes a bird (from another location again) that represents myself as omnipresent narrator, casting an eye over the landscape and telling its story. Here I am suggesting that the ‘history’ we consume as visitors/tourists to the old world, looking back over our colonial past, does not reflect the reality, but rather a fabrication now seen as real.

My overall approach (and the title) has at its heart the concept of hyperreality, variously defined, but here following Umberto Eco’s suggestion that hyperreality is a condition where what is real and what is fiction blend together. Theme parks and casinos are hyperrealities where a person can get lost for as long as their money lasts. There is no reality in these places, only an artificial construct that is designed to represent reality.

This series continues my interest in how we interpret present stimuli through the filter of past experience to form our perception of the world around us..

Kim LehmanLaunceston, Tasmania, April 2016

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List of images

Tales from Hyperreality #:

#1 (River Avon, Bath) - page 7#2 (Highgate Cemetery West, London) - page 2#3 (St James Park Lake, London) - cover & page 6#4 (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) - page 11 #5 (Saint-Émilion Monolithic Church, St-Émilion) - page 10#7 (Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling) - page 5#8 (River Kelvin, Glasgow) - page 8#9 (Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh) - page 4#10 (Regents Park, London) - page 9#11 (Saint Columba’s Church, Stirling) - page 3

Prints

Each image is available as an edition of ten, pigment print on 210gsm Canson Rag Photographique.

50 x 50cm: unframed (with a 2.5cm white border), and framed28 x 28cm: unframed (with a 2.5cm white border), and framed

Please contact Gallery Pejean: http://www.gallerypejean.com.au

Published by

Minx Temple

PO Box 1872, Launceston 7250

Tasmania AUSTRALIA minxtemple.com

ISBN 978-0-9942933-3-6

All images and text © 2016 Kim Lehman