The night passes slowly, too slowly. The streets appear a little wet or are they just reflecting colours falling from lit café windows? Some of these are peppered by the outline of solitary bodies. Are they waiting for the end of a long night before returning to a lodging only alive with the sounds of a long street?
You walk on uncaringly, or maybe you just want to appear so. It’s your protection. All the while, you are drinking in moments that grab your eye. The city is full of these fractures, like a kaleidoscope of memories that somehow wrench your own life. They are just bits of things, edges of a place half remembered. They form themselves as beautiful and delicate and precise; abstract and painterly in the way an artist might cut and paste and fret. They make a work you almost recognise, but of course, not quite, despite the notes that are triggered inside you. Is it a friend you once knew? Would they remember that closeness you once had? Is it a darkened corner where you left a moment of love or loss?
The photos captured by Bryan Fitzgerald do these things to me. His show, What My Eyes See, is on now until the 24th of August at Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Redfern. His eyes become our eyes through this collection of elegantly framed images, tall in the aspect of a digital device. They are each unique and simple moments that we leave behind as we pass through this city of ours. This city of so many souls, some coloured by the quiet melancholy of an Edward Hopper painting and some lit up by the abstraction of an evening street. You are amazed as it becomes patterned with the slashing wild gold of a setting sun.
You walk on through his palette as the evening darkens. Music and laughter come falling down from a high window. Another window quietly holds a body looking either out or in, you can’t really tell. It is a shape that either beckons or eludes. You smile as you walk on, sated by the full range of lives that colour and fill your city world.
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What My Eyes See by Bryan Fitzgerald
Wed–Sun until August 24
Rogue Pop-up Gallery, 130 Regent Street, Redfern
More info here
Thank you very much Linda, we’ll forward your message to our arts reviewer Alky, who will be very pleased to read it 🙂
Mesmerising words to match the languid and poignant images.