Like Dyer, the eight Chinese and Australian artists in the exhibition have established on-going professional and personal relationships in China and Australia. The exhibition raised questions as to why and how the artists maintain such a challenging process. How does an artist establish enduring connections between two seemingly disparate cultures?
What changes in an artist's practice when he or she lives and travels between two countries? What does it mean to be both an “insider” and an “outsider” in these cultures?
Dyer commented, “In A Reading it was curious to see the way the Australian colonial and Chinese histories interacted. I placed large-format, to-scale photographs of striking Georgian doorways of the library of an early colonial mansion in Sydney in the magnificent Red Gate Gallery Dongbianmen Ming Watchtower.”
The Greening Installation
The images used in A Reading were taken from a major work The Library of Forgetting that Dyer made for the exhibition Spare Room, at Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, Australia in 2007. Dyer was intrigued by the building's chequered life, from the residence of Englishman, Alexander Macleay, the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales to its current role as a museum.
Alexander Macleay, an amateur collector and avid researcher had four thousand books and an extensive insect collection that were the largest natural history reference anywhere in the colony. When construction began in 1826, Macleay insisted that the library be the largest room, and that a preparatory room be placed adjacent. Bankrupt by the Depression in the early 1840's, his books and extensive insect collection were dispersed or lost.
With Hitchcock's filmic scale Dyer brought back the books and insect collection for The Library of Forgetting. She crammed entrances and filled the library with columns of black painted books. Three thousand black laminated moths and butterflies swarmed from the library windows to the preparatory room where Macleay preserved and mounted his collection. "Viewers may think about access and loss," Dyer explained. "The simulated flight of the fabricated moths perhaps suggests escape or return, and subliminally, reactivates history."
