ANDREW CURTIS

ESP Machinery

1988

ESP Machinery is a Melbourne company that buys old manufacturing machinery, refurbishing them for global resale. In 1988 they gave me, then still a photography student, a key to the factory. I spent many nights there turning these dilapidated old machines into heroic sculptures. The results became my first solo exhibition, at John Buckley Gallery in 1990.

In the ESP Machinery series, refurbished factory machines are photographed formally, like portraits. These weird objects, purely functional in the cold light of day, are transformed into strange anthropomorphic figures, some of them human-like (a Kendo swordsman), some of them abstract (a modernist sculpture), together making up a gallery of surreal industrial readymades.

Greg Neville

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