Margins of Excess

About The Exhibition

Margins of Excess exists at the intersection between accepted truth and subjective realities, between fact and fiction. The series focuses on the stories of six characters based in North America all of whom momentarily received nationwide attention in the US press.

Darius McCollum drew the limelight through his compulsive high jacking of trains, Herman Rosenblat through his self-invented love-story set in a concentration camp during WWII and Richard Heene staged an elaborate television hoax. Rachel Doležal believes that she is African American and Ali Alqaisi claims to be the ‘hooded man’ in the iconic photo from Abu Ghraib prison while Jay J. Armes has all the hallmarks of a real-life superhero. Each of these characters maintain their own highly personal sense of individual truth in their attempts to realise a dream or passion, but were presented as frauds or deceivers by the mass media.

In responding to our so-called post-truth era, Margins of Excess proposes a new multi-layered approach to documentary photography, one where the definitions between truth, fiction and entertainment are fluid. The artist notes “I want to embrace a form of ‘realism’, rather than representing reality itself. Instead of experiencing images as objective representations, we should see them as proposals, or little arguments. My motive is not to unveil the reality behind illusion but to perceive the reality in the illusion itself.”

Curated by Sarah Allen