'nowhere now here' is an exhibition of photographs that explored sites at the very cusp of visible horizons, where perpetual motion is delicate to sight. These works are suspended afterimages, impressions of light shimmering matter, holding the great tension of slippage within the images’ borders, revealing where fading views become emergent glimpses.

‘A metaphysical view conveyed to us through Zen Buddhism is that everything big and small sits at the precipice of boundless space: vast outwardly as enormous inwardly. Everything appears to exist at this edge.

Parallels can be drawn between this perspective and our comprehension of reality through the modern interdisciplinary fields of physics and mathematics. As we venture into microscopic, nanoscopic and submicroscopic realms, our initial perceptions fade, revealing the intricate weave of the fabric of reality, of boundless space and transformation.

This exhibition of photographs, titled nowhere now here, captures something of the sheer wonder I experience when I suddenly awaken, lens to eye, at the precipice of the enigmatic moment of being alive. In that instant when the camera seems to merge with my eye, I find myself instinctively focused on subjects mingling with the ungraspable space between and around them, until such time as the perceived boundaries that contain them break down. I am often confounded by the fixity of these photographic afterimages, as they seem to translate my fascination with the infinitely mutable, the mysterious qualities of being awake to the fleeting moment.

Each photograph becomes a sort of enigmatic threshold – from afar, we see the image as a subject, and yet on approach, it radically transforms, revealing the unexplored terrain of delicate surface intricacies. Here, the experience of looking echoes J.A. Baker’s incisively remark in his book The Peregrine (1967), that “the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there”. In attending to the moment of intense observation, I often touch upon an edge, and I’m reminded of our fundamental inability to see what is really there, nor capacity to fully hold multiple perspectives in mind at one time. It is this that captivates me most. 

These afterimages reveal a moment that is itself an entirely new experience, a sharp reminder that the only thing that is not transient is transience itself.’

- Rohan Schwartz, 2023

Photographic documentation of the exhibition was taken by Sebastian Kainey, as well as Matthew Stanton of Melbourne Museum Photography. The exhibition was accompanied by a roomsheet which is available to view below, and includes the concrete poem ‘nowhere now here’, 2023.