counter-sites:
Isabella Capezio, Aaron Claringbold, Rebecca McCauley, Matt Dunne, Nicholas Mahady, Christine McFetridge, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis

Karl Halliday

Karl Halliday is a Naarm-based curator and photographic artist with a keen focus on lens-based work, publication practices and conceptual approaches to imagemaking. An impassioned advocate for the cultural, educational and therapeutic value of the arts, Karl has held curatorial and directorial positions across Naarm’s grassroots and nonprofit art sector.

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Madeleine Sherburn

Madeleine Sherburn is an emerging curator, writer and arts worker, with a focus on lens-based practices, artist-run-initiatives, and the intersections between the spectator, site-specificity and the environment. They are currently working as Gallery Coordinator at Blindside Artist Run Space, and Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

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Isabella Capezio

Isabella Capezio is an artist and photographer living on stolen Wurundjeri Country and lecturing at RMIT University. Isabella’s artwork and research spiral around themes of failure, queerness and landscape. Isabella has organised and facilitated various hands-on photography and photobook workshops. After recently completing a PhD that experimented with alternative ways to reflect on place, vision, nature and colonial power frameworks through landscape photography, they are now in the mercurial and slightly existential space of figuring out what comes next.

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Matt Dunne

Matt Dunne is an artist whose work explores Australia’s environment as a product of colonial legacy. Using photography and research as a basis, he develops publications, installations and education programs that engage wide-ranging and diverse audiences to deepen their connection to the world around them.

Trained as a teacher, Matt runs Tall Poppy Press – a publishing imprint dedicated to showcasing Australian artists. He has also written about photography widely, reviewing many photobooks and producing critical texts for exhibitions and galleries.

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Nicholas Mahady

Nicholas Mahady’s practice is concerned with depicting micro atmospheres – vague entities that are almost qualities rather than subjects. The conceptual framework around Mahady’s practice considers how to represent the unrepresentable, like atmospheres and energies, in the most realistic of mediums: photography. In this pursuit, Mahady plays with obfuscation and partial visibility, deliberately deciding what to reveal, what to cover, conceal or protect.

Mahady considers how poetry and language can serve as a foundation to producing new bodies of work — treating language as a form of sculptural device, considering how one places and pairs works. There is a core interest in the fracture between intention and perception, embracing the importance of accidental gestures and the human touch. This methodology frames his images not as narrative-driven, but as poetic objects that evoke rather than explain — meaning is not fixed but emerges.

Mahady has exhibited at Daine Singer, Hyacinth, Cathedral Cabinet, Five Walls, Connors Connors, Asbestos, Copeland Park and c3 Contemporary Art Space. He was recipient of the 2022 Fini Prize at Monash University and the 2024 New Photographers Program.

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Christine McFetridge

Christine McFetridge is a settler coloniser of British and Irish descent born in Aotearoa New Zealand and based on unceded Wadawurrung Country. She is an artist, educator and researcher represented by M.33, Melbourne. Using photography, video and text, McFetridge’s work aims to contest and unsettle colonial histories through an engagement with public archives. In 2024, she completed her doctoral research project An Inconvenient Curve: Unlearning Settler Colonial Representations of Birrarung.

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Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis

Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis is a proud Aboriginal woman of Pitta Pitta descent. She is an artist and researcher based on Kulin Land, Victoria, Australia.

After completing an Honours in Photography degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2020, she commenced a PhD at Monash University in 2021 through the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab, in the faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her arts practice is inextricably intertwined with her identity as a Pitta Pitta woman and aims to subvert and disrupt colonial approaches to image making and photography. Romanis’ research and practice is heavily informed by her family oral histories and photographic archives.

Her work has been exhibited in various galleries and arts festivals locally and internationally, some of which include Ars Electronica, PHOTO, The Museum of Australian Photography and Craft Victoria. In 2023, Romanis was a finalist in The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards based on Larrakia Country in Darwin. She currently works as a lecturer in the Art, Design and Architecture faculty at Monash University.

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Aaron Claringbold & Rebecca McCauley

Aaron and Rebecca are based in the south west of the continent. As artists they are interested in the role of images in seeing and imagining the world, and try to use photography as a tool for thinking and feeling a way through the mess of now. Working from their positions, which encompass settler-descendent, English, and Scottish ancestry, they make works about how we inhabit this place; about what we bring and what we take—and the many discrepancies and spaces between.

Working collaboratively they have exhibited works at a range of galleries and festivals across the country. 2024 highlights include: finalists in the 2024 National Photography Prize (MAMA), a solo at Goolugatup Heathcote, and Art on the Move’s Residency Program. From 2021–23 they facilitated STRAY VOLTAGE at Kings Artist Run—which saw video commissions, public programs and screenings—and were commissioned research artists at Next Wave, with Jack Mitchell and Eliki Reade. Other highlights include Leisuretime I (2022) for Next Wave Festival, Here’s what we know (Hillvale, 2023), and Hero(es) which screened at ACE, Dead End Film Festival, Darebin Art Prize, and Incinerator Art Award (2019–20).

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