Dali, 1993

Dali, the story of the murder of 15 year old Mudgee girl, Dali Jasmine Handmer Pleshet (1978-1993), is overtly political theatre. It’s a grim and trenchant plea for public responsibility in the face of inadequate gun laws.

Dali Jasmine Handmer Pleshet

Telling 1986,
A performance in two parts: part 1: distraction, part 2: surprise.

Big Wave Hunting (Horizon correction) 2012, ed 2/4. Digital and analogue photographs, constructed from multiple negatives and single frames. Seven box-framed images, sheet to internal frame edge, frame fascia 2 cm, frame depth 4 cm, 3-5 cm gap between images. Big Wave Hunting was inspired by English pictorialist photographer F. J. Mortimer (1874–1944).

“… In ‘Big Wave Hunting’ (2011), a series of photographic pictures consisting of a scatter of seven framed images, Kreckler depicts black-and-white seascapes in various stages of turmoil. In one, subtitled Decisive moment, he is crouched on the ocean’s rocky edge with camera in hand, dwarfed by a crashing wave of white water poised to overwhelm him. His posture, tense in anticipation of impact, mirrors an iconic image of the English pictorialist photographer F.J Mortimer (Big Wave Hunter 1916*). The only element missing is the thick rope that Mortimer would tie around his waist, anchored by an assistant at the other end whose role was to ensure the photographer wasn’t swept off the rocks… So, although it may seem that the mechanics of picture-making is the subject here, ‘Big Wave Hunting’ reaches beyond a pointed remark about the history of photography. As the photograph Kreckler himself took in that instant a close-up of the wall of white water — attests, the void renders the moment present with a resounding clarity. All else drops away… (the practice of Pictorialism)… exploited a desire for the emotions to be heightened through dramatic images that acted vicariously upon the viewer, but the tensions at play in Kreckler’s image chart a different course through this territory: if the photographer creates a representation of a moment, the performer, by contrast, embodies it.”1.

1. Quentin Sprague, Untitled Moment, from Accident&Process 2015, ed Talia Linz and Hannah Mathews

*Big wave hunting 1901-14, taken off the Scilly Isles by his nephew George Mortimer (image not shown held at AGNSW).