Archival photographs of the Birrarung (Yarra River) sourced from State Library Victoria, Museums Victoria and Melbourne Water collections. Photographs of Yarra River sites and neon sculptural works at historic points of intervention. Essay. Site-specific works on paper at points of river intervention, processed though reconfigured scanner as site actions. Floodplain, the new book by Melbourne-based artist James Geurts, not only traces the photographic history of Melbourne's iconic river – its floods, infrastructure and geographical significance – but expands on the cultural and environmental implications of our acts of intervention. Published to coincide with Geurts' exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery of Victoria, Floodplain forms a wider treatise about the mythology of the flood and the fallacies of environmental colonialism.
Employing extensive field research and various conceptual and geographic methodologies, James Geurts produces site and time-specific projects including the most recent project Floodplain which was shown at National Gallery of Australia (2018). Geurts has exhibited widely, including White Cube, London; GEMAK, Den Haag Netherlands; Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Israel; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; La Chambre Blanche, Quebec; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Geurts’ book Floodplain was published by Perimeter Editions in early 2018.
208 pages, 24 x 17cm, cold glue perfect bound, softcover, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne)