Kate Ballis

Garis & Hahn is pleased to present Hypercolour Fantasy: Infra Realism marking Melbourne-based photographer Kate Ballis' US debut and her first solo show with the gallery.

Inspired by Richard Mosse's groundbreaking infrared documentary series, Ballis' Infra Realism series features 13 large scale powerfully seductive photographs that transform everyday southern California archetypes--modernist architecture, pools, vintage cars and desert scenes--into otherworldly candy-colored dreamscapes. Shot with a specially converted full-spectrum mirrorless camera using various infrared filters, the artist reimagines iconic Palm Springs locations, such as the Ace Hotel & Swim Club, the Palm Springs Tennis Club and the Parker Hotel, as a surreal world in which succulents and palm trees are depicted in vibrant hues of blue, skies are a rich magenta, and swimming pools blood red. The contrasting, high-spirited colors illuminate the textures of the lush foliage that once blended into the desert landscape.

The hyper-saturated images subvert the desert city's previously muted landscape into mysteriously alluring, joyously alive technicolor fantasias, creating an unsettling ambiguity, an otherworldliness in which the viewer questions reality and the world around oneself. Making the unseen, seen, Ballis' infrared photographs offer a glimpse into the unknown, an uninhabited distant planet or parallel universe, at once strange and familiar.

The Australian publisher Manuscript will release a book for Infra Realism in November.

Kate Ballis (Australian, born 1985) is a Melbourne-based photographer and has exhibited at Black Eye Gallery; Sydney and at Art Fairs across Europe. Her work has been featured in Aesthetica, AnOther, Dezeen, Vice, Vogue Living, and Wallpaper. The artist’s first book, featuring Infra Realism, will be published by Manuscript in November 2018.