Review: MANIFEST DESTINY – ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2026 at Immersive Light And Art, 63 Light Square, Adelaide

Reviewed by Tori Nguyen, Wednesday 4th March 2026.

Manifest Destiny is an immersive visual arts exhibition, featuring the works of South Australian photographic artist, Alex Frayne. The inclusion of traditional film photography, digital immersion, and original music composed by Donnie Sloan, creates a multi-sensory experience for audiences of the Adelaide Festival 2026.

On entering the exhibition, audiences are greeted by a woman behind a counter with a heavy Texan accent, the owner/manager of a rural American motel. She welcomes and proudly tells the guests about how long the family has been operating the business and introduces her seven children through a family photo on the wall, amongst many other memories of the achievements of the time. Her religious beliefs come through strongly and swiftly as she shares family stories, hopes, and dreams, then refers to the old analogue television on the side of this introductory set. Guests then enter the motel through the door and into the main gallery space of ILA.

Large-scale coloured photos of well-known American locations, such as San Francisco and Venice Beach, are immediately visible. A mixture of coloured and black and white prints, mostly editions of 10, are displayed strategically on the irregular angled and curved walls of the gallery. Two sets of framed montages, diptych works, portrait and landscape images double-stacked, due to the limited wall space and the size of the artworks, successfully provoke thoughts and emotions in the viewers. Danni Zuvela and Julianne Pierce are the curator and producer, respectively, of the exhibition, while the immersive experience as a whole, is directed and produced by ILA’s Creative Director, Melissa Lee.

In a separate room, through the doorway, audiences are invited to a seated immersion with a panoramic 180-degree view, consisting of 100 square metres of LED screens, with moving images of the exhibited photographs and large surrounding speakers playing Sloan’s ambient soundtrack. On the opposite side we see video footage of Frayne at work while on his travels.

It is often a privilege to be able to talk with the artist directly and hear their stories and experiences that have led them to create the work on display. Speaking with Frayne himself, we find out that the works are shot over a 3-year period in three one-month-long trips, across the West, Deep South, and Bible Belt regions of the country. Themes of faith, hope, dreams, decay, and despair, are expressed through vibrant and often colourful images reflecting American pop culture. His background in jazz music and experience in showbiz explains the vibe behind several of the works. Frayne captures silent stills containing movement in his compositions, exposing isolated places and eerie ghost towns, while simultaneously drawing parallels with many rural and outback places in our own country.

Each piece of work has a human element and Frayne’s analogue photography captures the history, presence, and future of people and place. The artwork descriptions give deeper meaning to the photographs, through anecdotes, song lyrics, and quotes, and provide additional insight into the artist’s joys and challenges during his creative process.