Marian Drew is best known for her exquisite Australian road kill portraits, one of which was recently acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. For her new series of large format photos, Drew has trained a wide-spread aperture on watery twilit Australian landscapes. Using a dual-camera long-exposure technique, she was able to open the shutter and step into the frame, venturing out into waist-deep bodies of water in the landscapes’ foregrounds to wave a torch in patterned gestures.

In the resulting exposure only the moonlit scene and neon-like lines of Drew’s arms-length light scribbles are visible. The passage of time is measurable in the strange diffused reflections of the torch on the water’s surface. Printed on cotton paper, the images do have a dreamy, numinous sense of presence.

Folding drawing, performance and landscape photography into a single image, the ideas driving this work are potent; yet the final product looks disappointingly amateurish. Subtracting the light effects, the landscapes are unremarkable in and of themselves, and Drew ought to have spent more time developing her torch drawing technique, as only a few of the strokes take on compelling shapes.

Patrick Brzeski

The Gallery @ Art-lease, until September 4