Photo show reveals change

The shifting character behind a backroad stretch in Soldiers Hill is forming the focus behind a photo exhibition housed within the Old Butchers Shop Gallery’s rear shed.

Scott Fredericks’ The Red Line show, on display until December 1, explores the local creative’s regular journey from his home to his workshop, and how the structures along that path have warped with the changing landscape.

“It maps out ground that I walk fairly regularly, a couple of times a week,”he said.

“It sort of goes through country and places of suburbia I really like and older parts of town like miners’ cottages, houses that have been extended over time.

“Much of it morphs into industrial land with the factories that were worked in by the people that lived in these houses, and land along the train line.

“To me it’s sort of the opposite of what it’s become now. I live in the suburb, that’s become gentrified, yet there’s a sort of resistance to that which is these little industrial pockets.”

Featuring 22 photos, all of which were shot at night, the pieces in the collection were taken from as far back as 2019.

The photographs depict places and landmarks found between Clyde and Little Clyde streets towards Fredericks’ Holmes Street workshop, along a corridor he’s dubbed the red line. “There’s stuff in there that’s deliberately ambiguous from vehicles, caravans, houses,” he said.

 

“They’re deliberately a bit misleading. There’s some stuff that’s easy to read in terms of sharper works and others intentionally blurry, out of focus, with some movement.

“It’s an aesthetic I’ve been working on for a few years, breaking down the technical perfection of photography into something more expressive, more like a painting or sculptures, without the problems of truth.”

The show marks Fredericks’ first solo photography show in Ballarat since participating in the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015.

Fredericks said the industrial settings captured in the show lend themselves well to their exhibiting space.

“It’s exactly the place I wanted to show this rather than a white-walled gallery,” he said.

“This was an opportunity to show this in a place that had a dirty and real feel, and something that tied back into this work’s motivation with the working-class element bubbling under the surface.”