JUSTINE VARGA
Sounding Silence


19 February to 22 March 2014

Justine Varga’s images contain silence, space and peace, bringing a sense of the sublime inside, to the minutiae of the everyday. They aren’t simply made in her studios, so much as made with them. The ephemera that accumulates in her workspace, the surfaces, textures and temperaments that seem to change with the daily cycles of natural light, provide both the setting and subject for her images.

Sounding Silence reduces these elements to the very periphery of recognition, described by Varga as “playing at the edge of vision”. The works, like individual exercises in restraint, use only the most understated of objects, the barest essentials of light and form, and ask only the most fundamental of questions—how fine is that line which distinguishes something and nothing; how much sound do we need to appreciate the silence?

While her compositions reveal themselves in the everyday—a crumpled tax receipt, a discarded piece of bubble wrap, an area of light that happens across a wall—these are only the starting points in a process of painstaking refinement, framing, revisiting, sometimes over days, sometimes over weeks. Her works tease out those moments when simple things become so much more than their makings. Scratching away her own wall markings, for instance, to find the cusp of them being there and not there, or, capturing those seconds when the thinnest slice of sticky tape is dappled by light filtering through the trees outside.

Varga reminds us to allow for fleeting moments of quiet, to notice the understated beauty before, around, in the gaps, of the image and information cluttered world that tends to envelop us.


Justine Varga has achieved impressive recognition since graduating with Honours from the National Art School, Sydney in 2007. This year she has been awarded the Australia Council for the Arts London Studio Residency. In 2013, she was joint winner of the Josephine Ulrick & Win Shubert Photography Award, and was a Finalist in both the Bowness Photography Prize and the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship for Emerging Artists. In 2012, she was selected for Primavera, MCA Australia, a prestigious exhibition showcasing key Australian artists under 35, and featured in Flatlands, Art Gallery of NSW and in The Lookout, National Art School Gallery. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of NSW, Macquarie University and Artbank.