Horizonites
Post Office Projects
Kaurna Country, 1 February to 4 March 2023

It is said that there was once a poem that divided a people. Whilst it was nothing special, although certainly nothing derivative, the verse cleaved a community in two. For some who heard it, the poem instilled a sense of awe or wonderment at the horizon — the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance. They saw in this woozy line a new land, a plain of potentiality. Their critics, however, decried them for their rejection of the actual plains in favour of a land that was illusory. It is said that this schism continues to reverberate, and is the basis of the distrust those who live in the interior of the continent have for those who occupy the edges.

Horizonites emerges from our interest in the devotion that underpinned this conflict and the way in which time, planetarity and connectivity tangle themselves about the horizon line - that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. The Horizonites are a fictional faction, brought to life by author Gerald Murnane in The Plains (1982). This novel unfurls amidst the oppressive heat of the inland and the rustle of yellowing brush spreading out across paddocks and landscapes. Murnane’s prose captures the diffuse, shifting and obsessive qualities of the horizon, telling the story of those who seek some way in which to understand, and capture the horizon. This exhibition brings together works submitted by photographers from across the globe, realising an archive from a multiplicity of horizons distributed across time and space. Horizonites is an attempt to manifest the horizon; inviting, inscrutable and ineffable.

The Horizon, After All by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse

Horizonites was an exhibition for Post Office Projects (Kaurna Country/Port Adelaide) seeking photographic contributions. This exhibition emerges from our shared research into questions of time, planetarity and connectivity as they relate to the horizon line - that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. Drawn from Gerald Murnane’s The Plains this exhibition attempts to manifest a particularly terrestrial ‘overview effect’, with attention to that ‘scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance’.