Clouds on Collins
December 2012
Trevor Mein: ‘Cirrus’
Victorian photographic artist Trevor Mein recently inaugurated ‘Cirrus’ – an exhibition of beautifully captured clouds, now showing at the Sofitel on Collins.
Having been raised on a sheep farm in rural Victoria, Melbourne-based Mein later came to photography via architecture and fashion design. The wide open spaces of his upbringing inform his signature images – one thinks of The Orb’s dreamy hit “Little Fluffy Clouds” (1990) as potential soundtrack here – where Mein captures and interprets space and atmosphere. Over twenty years of work as a leading architectural, commercial and art photographer have given him this grounding, and add a further layer of experience to his explorations of the sublime in his photographs of clouds.
Just as cirrus can signal the coming of a storm or cyclone, all clouds are portents of changing weather – if we know how to read them. This elemental moodiness is central to their hold on our imaginations. When we look to the heavens, we don’t simply see meteorological phenomena; we also see the inconstant landscape of the human heart writ large in the sky. This tense combination of light and darkness, of fragility and strength, of gentleness and brute force, of the mutable and the eternal is beautifully captured in these works.
Framed by his camera and plucked from the sky, clouds become numinous or brooding objects, explosions of refracted light; undulating quilts of densely spun thread; dark screens through which colour pulses like a giant eye; gossamer veils shot through with solar shafts. ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything,’ sings Leonard Cohen, ‘that’s how the light gets in.’ To look at these works is to wonder why we all aren’t cloudstruck, scanning the sky every moment we get.
Unlike the static world of architecture and interiors to which Trevor Mein devotes much of his professional life, the sky is an ever-changing arena of moment-by-moment drama. As snapshots of never-to-be-repeated instants, his photographs are reminders of how ephemeral – like clouds – all life is. This, as Mein puts it, is the ‘fabulous and sad’ knowledge gained in pursuing clouds. And yet for all their turbulence, watching clouds is, for Mein, a time of stillness and reflection, a time to revisit his childhood love of castles in the air.
Trevor Mein’s ‘Cirrus’ shows at Sofi’s Lounge, Level 1, Sofitel Melbourne On Collins until February 18, 2013.
sofitel-melbourne.com.au
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