Darryl Chapman – Infinite Redshift
Exhibition Date: Tuesday, 20 May to Saturday, 31 May 2025
Opening: Tuesday, 20 May, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: Sausage Gallery, Shop 3, 1–13 Katoomba Street, Katoomba NSW
Join us for the inimitable exhibition at Sausage Gallery, featuring the dissociative work Infinite Redshift by inspirational artist Darryl Chapman.
Darryl is a photographer and maker who lives and works in Katoomba.
Short Artist Statement
As a photographer, I am fascinated by the interplay of light, shadow, time, and perception—forces that shape how we see and interpret the world. My work explores these themes through both visual and conceptual lenses. The science of black holes, with their ability to bend light and distort time, offers a compelling metaphor for photography itself. Much like a camera’s aperture or the human iris, a black hole governs the passage of light—but also alters it, stretching it, shifting it. I aim to represent this tension between what is seen and what is hidden, suggesting that vision is always a negotiation between presence, absence, and perspective.
More about Infinite Redshift
As a photographer, the relationships between light and dark, time and perception are ever present in the way I see the world around me. The abstract science that informs our knowledge of how Black holes function has also always fascinated me. A black hole can serve as a powerful metaphor for the iris in eyesight or the aperture in photography because of their similar functions involving control over light.
Imagine the black hole as a cosmic aperture that doesn’t just limit light like a camera or eye iris but also alters the light that passes through or near it. Because of the black hole’s intense gravity, light escaping from its vicinity becomes redshifted, its wavelength stretched and shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Both black holes and photography demonstrate that time is relative and dependent on perspective.
Near a black hole, gravity distorts the flow of time, causing different perceptions depending on your position. In photography, technique manipulates how viewers perceive time, either freezing motion or emphasising movement to alter perception. Perception of time is thus not absolute but shaped by context, whether by the extreme gravity near a black hole or the deliberate choices made in capturing an image.
The black hole, acting as a kind of extreme aperture, influences light in two ways: by limiting or bending it (like controlling light entry) and by redshifting it. This mirrors how the iris and camera aperture regulate light for vision or photography, except in the cosmic case, gravity itself is the controlling “aperture,” with redshift as a signature of the black hole’s powerful influence on light’s journey.