Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Fringe Program 2013

I’d heard about the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB), but I’d never had the chance to see it or be part of it until 2013. My good friend and university colleague Denise Regan, had attended some of the workshops in 2011 and waxed lyrically about the amount of exhibitions, the quality of the workshops and how inspiring the biennale was. As a high school visual communication teacher Denise got a lot out of the 2011 biennale. So I suggested to Denise, why don’t we put an exhibition together for 2013 fringe program?

We decided our medium would be instant photography, past and present. Denise works with Polaroids and I work with Instagram. The two square formats worked well together. We worked through a few themes, deciding on road trips, hence the title of Square Route.

Having once been housemates, Denise and I now live almost 1000kms apart. All our planning was done by telephone, email and other forms of social media. We checked out the fringe venues on the BIFB website, chose a few we liked the look of, and planned a meet-up in Ballarat in February 2013.

In 2013, there were 67 fringe venues. We were part of the Lake Circuit consisting of seven venues. We chose a cafe called Eclectic Tastes.

Eclectic Tastes is a classic old corner store, with tables set up in old rooms of what would’ve once been the residence of the owner. Denise and I had one back room featuring stunning orange walls. Margot gave us a lot of freedom and we were able to hang our exhibition exactly as we’d planned.

Denise trying to narrow down a selection of her images.

Installing exhibitions is what I do for my day job, so I wanted to make this hang easy and cost-effective but with as much impact as possible. Margot let us nail directly into the wall, using mini clipboards, we clipped our photographs to the boards which were laid out in a grid formation.

Keeping the works small and working within the constraints of the space, we were still able to display a total of 30 works, 15 photographs each.

In the depths of rainy, windy cold Winter night we had a small exhibition launch.