CAROLINE KHA: THE TOURIST

7 - 29 June 2013

To collect photographs is to collect the world. (Susan Sontag)

dalla Rosa is proud to present The Tourist, Caroline Kha's second solo show at the gallery. The new body of work plays on the construction of place through found images, tokens, maps, postcards and travel guides. The show is an invitation to travel and spend time looking at things familiar in a new context.

Kha has produced paintings, collages, drawings, and text-based works with the aim to discover and re-discover familiar locations through varied documentation. The work is about creating compositions that encourage a more sustained viewing or engagement with otherwise ordinary images and objects such as landscape pictures, postcards, rocks and stamps.

I prefer working in series and I'm interested in exploring reproductions, small modulations and permutations of form. Collections of these images can lead to a construction of a sense of place or of the object depicted. The new graphite drawings are based on small rocks I've collected as tokens during my own travels to tourist destinations like Saqqara in Egypt. In contrast, the silverpoint drawings depict a series of volcanic islands which are difficult to access due to strong currents and high cliffs. These drawings concentrate on exploring mass and surface. (Caroline Kha, 2013)

Wish you were here is a series of Django Fontina postcards, a type of card written and posted to strangers as a means of distributing poetry. The typed poems reconfigure text from old postcards, mostly dating from the 1970s, that were sent from popular tourist destinations around Britain. The postcards are in pairs, each poem accompanied by a continuous-line drawing of the map identifying the location described.

The book installation Passages is a collective travel anthology surveying memories, personal experiences and travel publications. Participants were asked to lend a travel guide and identify key locations they found memorable. Some books in the collection are well travelled and used; having been faithful travel companions in places like India, Colombia, Thailand and Russia. Other books remain pristine, silent reminders of dream locations still to explore.

About the Artist

Caroline Kha was born in Australia and studied Fine Art and Science before moving to London and starting a one-year residency at the Florence Trust in 2009. Her work has been exhibited in Sydney, Tokyo, and London, in 2010 dalla Rosa presented her first solo show in Britain, A Spot of Time. For the second year in a row Kha has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (10 June – 18 August).