Mossenson Galleries Collingwood in association with the Melbourne Fringe Festival is very proud to present Urban Country, the first Melbourne solo exhibition by Perth-based Indigenous photographer and new media artist Glenn Pilkington. The exhibition will be opened by Kath Melbourne, Melbourne Fringe Festival Creative Producer, at 6pm on Tuesday 18 September 2007. The artist will be present for the opening.

Glenn Pilkington is an urban-based Indigenous photomedia artist from Perth. After spending much of his childhood in the Kimberley, Pilkington's life altered greatly when his family was uprooted to Bunbury in WA's South-West. This move from north to south forced him to confront issues regarding his Aboriginality and sexuality. Through the investigation of space - both natural and urban - Pilkington's work explores the connection with country that he feels as an Indigenous person living and working within the urban environment.

Through fragmentation and repetition, Pilkington produces a uniquely Indigenous view of urbanity - a view that is tempered by his cultural affinity to place. Steel and glass structures are returned to the landscape, taking on the appearance of the traditional Indigenous design. Trains and sky-scrapers take on a totemic life as they are distorted through the artist's lens, becoming site markers for the process of identity creation. According to Glenn, "My work explores the emotional journey of relocation. The journey from remote to urban jungle, the sense of displacement and social misalignment that the individual feels when removed and tested by modern times in modern cities. Removal from the familiar, tied with the stresses that come from everyday urban life while making transition from child to adult and the relationship developed between environment and individual."

The pun or double-take inherent in the title of Pilkington's exhibition - Urban Country - speaks to the sense of dislocation and fragmentation, both geographic and emotional, that he has experienced in being torn away from an arcadian childhood to inhabit an urban environment that seems entirely alien. The process of readjustment to urban life, and of reintegrating the fragments of a shattered existence, has become the key element in Pilkington's photographic work, which is often composed through a process of montage, repetition of image-fragments that accrete into strikingly geometric forms. A series of elongated scroll-like works present visual accounts of urban traveling - visual accounts of public transport journeys that stand in Pilkington's iconography for the renegotiation of a sense of place that occurs amidst the disorientation of urban life, and the reimagining of traditional ancestral journeys.

Glenn Pilkington's work has been acquired by the Rockhampton Art Gallery in Queensland and the University of Hertfordshire in England. In the past twelve months his work has been selected in the Ergon Energy Central Queensland Art Award, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Hutchins Art Prize and Willoughby Art Prize, and his work has featured on the cover of the Indigenous Law Bulletin, University of New South Wales.

Mossenson Galleries Collingwood is very proud to present the first Melbourne solo exhibition by Perth-based Indigenous photomedia artist Glenn Pilkington. For further enquiries, please contact the Mossenson Galleries on (03) 9417 6694 or collingwood@mossensongalleries.com.au.