August Friends Night: Magic Lantern with Martyn Jolly

What’s so magic about the magic lantern? 

Join Martyn Jolly for a hands-on exploration of the way this extraordinary apparatus, along with its hand painted glass slides, created illusions across the centuries. We will create some magic together!

Martyn Jolly is an Honorary Associate Professor of the Australian National University School of Art & Design. He is an artist and a writer. As an artist he has participated in several major curated exhibitions and developed solo exhibitions which creatively re-use archival photographs. Jolly completed his PhD on fake photographs and photographic affect at the University of Sydney in 2003. In 2015 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World.  Since then, Jolly has developed a series of collaborative magic lantern performances around Australia, available on the Heritage in the Limelight website.  In 2020, with Elisa deCourcy, he co-edited The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting, and co-authored Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J. W. Newland.