Simulacra Diorama.  


Photographers Gallery Bristol
Simulacra Diorama
Photographer Above the Rainbow Gallery, Bristol, 1983

Simulacra Diorama No1

Gallery view lighbox diorama with coloured lights
and pyramids double image view.

From 1982-83 Brereton was living in the inner city suburb of St Pauls, Bristol. He was working as a gallery director at King Street Gallery while exhibiting and playing a bit of digeridoo in post punk bands (I Don't Know, Blue Aeroplanes). In the previous six months he had travelled to Europe, Greece and Egypt. This photographic exhibition was at an independent artist run space Photographers Above The Rainbow Gallery. This show was followed up with two Bristol exhibitions with Kit Edwardes (Alter/Altar at King St Gallery and Natural Histories at Watershed Gallery) before returning to Australia with the touring Natural Histories exhibition in late 1983.

The Simulacra Diorama show was made up of still images that took on the dynamics of frames taken from an imaginary film. The photos were then loosely hand coloured. Others were placed in box frames with Xmas lights and flouro tubes surrounding them. The overall affect was that of an museological display of a lost early documentary travel film.

The mood is both nostalgic and pathetic in the sense that only a few arbitary frames remain as a record of whole experience (history of an event). Yet these few images take on their own contemporary meanings that have little to do with the initial filmic aims and objectives. This is the fate of most fims of the first 20 years of film history.