As Western civilization begins its plunge off the global oil peak, Kay Orchison is using a simple Soviet camera symbolic of another fallen empire to explore abandoned sites of industry and agribusiness.
These scenes of haunted, vanishing beauty are printed as digital watercolors in a unique process that makes the colors run and the shadows bleed into the light.

If this is lomography, it is lomography like you've never seen it.

The works are ‘atopic’ – being of no place – in a number of ways.

“The Atopia series is an exploration of artificial inhospitable environments: places which are utilitarian rather than welcoming, and are usually unpeopled. Seldom visited and little cared for, they are ‘atopic’ again in the sense of being disregarded.
They may be ‘atopic’ in a third sense, that of being doomed to abandonment.
Some are already abandoned and are yet to be re-used, making them ‘atopic’ in the sense of being unpurposed, unclassified space. Many are legally or politically contested, making them ‘atopic’ in the sense of being no-man’s-land.
Many of them are also geographically isolated, making them ‘atopic’ in the sense of being in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, they are ‘atopic in that an uncaptioned photograph of an empty, anonymous space lacking easily recognisable landmarks seems as if it could be almost anywhere. This subverts the traditional project of landscape photography: instead of an elegant exposition of the beauty of a particular place in a particular light, these are terse, even critical remarks on generic kinds of spaces.” – Kay Orchison

The photographs were taken many hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers apart. They are united only by absences and aporias of the Australian landscape. In a nation, which so often culturally defines itself by landscape, these culturally created landscapes define blank spots in our national consciousness.

Kay Orchison is an emerging visual artist from Sydney.
His praxis is located in the fringes of photography, using such techniques as direct object scanning, medium format toy cameras, Polaroid SX-70 and dye-based digital printing on uncoated cold-pressed etching papers.
He resists captioning, exploring the photographic in a laminable space where the image is left unidentified and mute or connected obliquely to an entire body of writing rather than directly to a reassuring label. He employs abandoned things and places such as small scraps of detritus and the oneiric landscapes of industry and agriculture. Most of his work since completing Honours at Sydney College of the Arts in 1999 has been handmade covers for limited edition publications of Australian poetry. In 1999 he won the Siglo Prize with Michael Brennan for their collaboration on Locuting Love.