Into Mt Mangana 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall		installation of exhibition

Obscured Hartz 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall

Towards Huon Island 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall

Into the Hartz 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall

View of La Perouse 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall

Across the Channel 2012 oil, pigment on paper 120 x 120cm triptych (framed)		in situ on 3.7m wall

Obscured Hartz study 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 40 x 105cm triptych (each panel 40 x 35cm)		installation view

Adamson's Peak at nighfall study 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 40 x 105cm triptych (each panel 40 x 35cm)

Across the Channel study 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 40 x 105cm triptych (each panel 40 x 35cm)		installation view

Towards Huon Island study 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 40 x 105cm triptych (each panel 40 x 35cm)

Grave Hartz I 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 30 x 75cm triptych (each panel 30 x 25cm)		Grave Hartz II 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 30 x 75cm triptych (each panel 30 x 25cm)

Grave Hartz III 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 30 x 75cm triptych (each panel 30 x 25cm)		Grave Hartz IV 2012 acrylic, oil and pigment on wood panel 30 x 75cm triptych (each panel 30 x 25cm)		installation view
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In these new works by Caroline Rannersberger she continues her engagement with the land and with vision. She has never offered ‘merely landscape’ in her artworks but rather a hallucinatory approximation of the world in images of discovery and recognition. In these works, as is her customary practice, she has worked from a direct encounter with the land out in the field and then reformulated that experience as a fiction in the studio.
At times these works have the appearance of glass slides removed from an enormous microscope, they twist and shift our sense of scale and play with our insecurities. Like words written on water they first disturb our own reflection before they distort and camouflage what lies submerged below. She reminds us, contrary to the cliché that you see the work and finish it, that in that act of seeing an artwork you are not completing but extending the fiction of its production.
She has always chosen to entangle the experience of her immersion into a specific location with that of the vision of a predecessor, a similar alien intruder, be they explorer, artist or mystic. In her earlier works from the north of Australia it was the handwritten accounts of Leichardt and in these new works from the far south of Tasmania it is the presence of La Perouse and D’Entrecasteaux whose visions squeeze and distort our optic.
In all her works we observe the observer, we experience an encounter that seems impossible, that of seeing the sensation of seeing and its apparent dissolution. She attempts to capture that tremulous state, what Alain Badiou has called elsewhere, “the movement of disappearance”, a disturbance not yet transformed into an object nor cast in negation as an absence, but rather the actuality of disappearance itself.
In this way through a rejection of the redundant descriptions offered by representational landscape, she is able to erect a complicated constructed layer of images fused at the edge of a cylindrical vision, where time, space and matter are wrapped back around upon themselves and are seen as though viewed through the boundary that surrounds them.
In this way we experience the land as always a double, an existence of something existing prior to the existence of human thought itself.

Donal Fitzpatrick
Auckland
New Zealand 18/02/12