grahame galleries + editions

Each month over 10 months from October 2007 to July 2008 Wight made a postcard in an edition of 40, which she posted to a ‘select few’ including family members and friends in Australia an overseas.
The project was titled ‘then and there 1937 – 1946’, a period full of upheaval for many Australian families. ‘then and there’ is based on a group of photographs of the Wight family from this period. They were sent from Victoria by Wight’s mother to her sister living in North-West Western Australia and returned to the artist in 2007. On the back of the photographs were comments and sometimes drawings. The book opens with a reproduction of the first postcard showing a photograph of the artist’s father and the verso containing a drawing of a planned house on the Mornington Peninsular. It is titled ‘c. 1937 father – car – dream’. This dream was never fulfilled. Wight’s father was a RAAF pilot. His aircraft disappeared in New Guinea during the war and was not found until some 20 years later. Like memory ‘Post’ jumps back and forth and is neither a chronological report on the family nor on the decade. The artist’s jottings are preparatory notes to go with the page image. The postage stamps are indicative of the ‘through-the-post’ project and sometimes point to the specific ‘postcard’. Page 4 shows the garage, which became the family’s home from 1942 – 1949’, and the postage stamp of a Border Collie. A Border Collie being the family’s pet at that time. The rubber stamped Postage Paid Australia stamp is from Wight’s exhibition invitation held in 1994. On page 7 the notation from the photograph’s verso, ‘On this site we hope to build a ‘long-low-white house’, is transposed across the photograph. At the bottom of this page the artist writes, ‘The evaporation of dreams.’ It is true that this decade evaporated many dreams. Posted is nevertheless full of hope.
Edition of 10 plus 2 ap $880