Every Public House on the Parramatta Line is currently being exhibited (April 7 – May 8, 2026) at The Digital Gallery. The Gallery is located in The Learning Space, Building 2/30 Shoreline Dr, Rhodes. View in Google Maps. The gallery is open every day, viewing hours can be found here.

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Medium: Twin channel video (Super 8 film transferred to high definition video)

Duration: 10 mins 14 secs

Shot entirely on Super-8 film, Every Public House on the Parramatta Line (EPH) is a fluid and impressionistic interpretation of the landscape directly adjacent to the train line that runs between Central and Parramatta, and Parramatta and Central. These two journeys are portrayed through a pair of discreet though interrelated films that play simultaneously across an extended screen space. The project employs two distinct modes of visual representation: fleeting, hand held footage shot from a moving train contrasted with more studied architectural footage that investigates the various pubs that can be spotted from the railway.

Integral to this work is a soundtrack created for the project by musician/composer John Encarnacao. The soundtrack at once intensifies the imagery while lending a logic to the temporal and spatial montage at work across the two films.

The title of the work is a none-too-subtle reference to Ed Ruscha’s 1966 photo-book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. By using Ruscha’s deceptively simple idea of an architectural survey tied to a transportation route it was my intention to foreground the subject matter, conceptual precedents and methodological approach of EPH. Like Ruscha’s book EPH pays witness to the contemporary reality of the city. In doing so it evidences the multitude of social, economic and historical forces at play. In the case of Sydney 2026, it is a landscape constantly re-defined by an urgent accelerated sense of change. The hotel buildings pictured, are largely remnants of the two preceding centuries, and are often shown in sharp historical and stylistic contrast to the surrounding built environment. These hotel buildings do not stand mute but rather speak from the past to a fragile uncertain present.

It is intended that this sense of historical rupture is further promoted by the use of Super-8 film; a medium defined by its unstableness, grain and lack of resolving power.  By employing these characteristics as a form of visual poetics, EPH evokes a sense of the uncanny; as the present is drawn through the appearances of the past. For those that know the city there is an undeniable sense of recognition at play within the films. However, rather than simply resting on a sense of nostalgia, it is intended that the work leads the viewer to reflect on their own relationship to this landscape as an ever-changing and defining presence. In essence, EPH is an exercise in recognising the way the past inhabits the present, through material and psychic remnants.

While these train journeys provide an easily apprehended and seemingly natural narrative structure to the work, this structure is invariably tested by the sense of psycho-geographic drift that pervades. Rather than providing closure by arriving at a final destination, EPH asks the viewer to contemplate the journey and its attendant architectural forms as a type of unresolvable evidence.

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EPH is accompanied by a limited edition artist’s book titled Some Public Houses on the Parramatta Line. This publication was produced as a textual complement to the moving image work, bringing together historical news stories connected to the hotels.  It is available at the exhibition.

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Soundtrack by John Encarnacao

Mastered by Tim Bruniges

Shot on Kodak 200T, 500T & 50D between June 2024 & March 2026

Film processed by Nanolab and Rewind Sydney

Film scanned by Mount Analogue

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