MERILYN FAIRSKYE Between 1992 - 2000 one thousand people were photographed. Each one was asked their first name, their occupation and their country of birth. These are three of them. The images form an archive out which many different artworks have been created. The archive can be seen as a sort of mapping of the things that give people their identification. The people I photographed were people I came across in my everyday life, so it is also like a personal diary for that period of time. Small groupings of the images have appeared in paintings, photographic transparencies, light boxes, and the entire archive forms a video installation called "eye contact" that has been exhibited around Australia and overseas. Recently, I have revisited the archive and have been pulling out discrete groups of images to build new associations and relationships between them. This particular trio, three young people, are unknown to each other. Like the other handful of children in the series, they were only photographed accidentally. I was photographing their parents and they happened to be there. They are: lauren, school student, north america This is the first time that I have positioned the images horizontally and cropped them so closely. Without any visual clues to help us, the images are ambiguous. Are they asleep or awake, alive or dead? What are we supposed to think when we look at them? And what do we project onto their faces when they are not looking back at us? Merilyn Fairskye is represented in Sydney by Stills Gallery.
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