Jon Setter (b. Detroit, Michigan, 1989) takes the beach as a chance to notice manmade environments. The New York City-based photographer, who lived in Sydney for a decade, has forged an international reputation based on pictures that reframe details of urban landscapes as fine-tuned compositions of geometry and hue, evoking hard-edged painters as much as his fellow lensmen. In “(name of exhibition),”  iconic stretches of Sydney and suburban coastline—Manly, Dee Why, Bronte, Coogee, Maroubra, Narrabeen, Tamarama, Bondi and Palm Beach—become backdrops to both human constructions and the labyrinth of the artist’s mind. 

These sixteen prints reject the worn trope of the beach as a panorama with a dramatic horizon

line and dainty whitecaps. Instead, poignant geographies enable Setter to capture miniature,

mighty flourishes: how a shadow settles beside the window trim on a surf club, how a swath of

paint bordering a rock pool radiates sunlight. The sky itself serves as another shade in his

palette, a shape in his metaphorical scrapbook. Rectangles of cerulean seem carved out of

buildings. His flat picture planes, which find abstraction within the commonplace, treat celestial, architectural and earthly elements as equal.