Shortwave is a short film commissioning program from Sydney Opera House, which invites Australian artists to explore their relationship with the screen. Each Shortwave film centres on the interplay between art, performance and screen, showcasing radical, innovative and experimental approaches to filmmaking.

‘In the Forest, I Found Myself’ by Travis De Vries is a multidisciplinary project operating across photography, moving image and soundscape. At its centre is Travis, a photographer whose practice becomes a point of fracture rather than clarity. As he documents landscapes and liminal spaces, his images begin to reveal things he did not intend to see - patterns, absences, and presences that sit just beyond rational explanation.

The work is structured through an ongoing dialogue between Travis and a psychiatrist. These conversations initially read as a therapeutic attempt to ground the artist, to process anxiety, obsession, and the psychological toll of prolonged isolation. Over time, however, the exchanges take on a more adversarial tone. The psychiatrist’s questions begin to feel less diagnostic and more probing, as though the act of looking itself is under examination.

Drawing from cosmic horror and noir detective traditions, the project reframes the photographer as an unreliable witness. The landscape resists being understood, mapped, or aestheticised. The camera - long trusted as an objective tool - becomes a source of tension. Rather than offering clarity, it strips away distance, revealing truths that feel intrusive, destabilising, and impossible to fully comprehend.

In the Forest, I Found Myself refuses resolution. It lingers in uncertainty, asking what it means to look closely, to document obsessively, and to claim authorship over images when the world being photographed may not consent to being known.

Travis De Vries is a Gamilaroi and Darug multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, sound, and writing. His practice is grounded in atmosphere and tension, exploring how images, stories, and technologies shape — and distort — our understanding of place, power, and truth.

Across his work, Travis is interested in moments where systems begin to fracture: where documentation becomes intrusion, where observation carries consequence, and where certainty gives way to unease. His projects often sit at the intersection of contemporary culture, First Nations ways of knowing, and speculative or cosmic frameworks, using genre as a tool rather than an endpoint.

Travis is the founder and creative director of Awesome Black, a First Nations–led creative studio and publishing platform, and works under the musical moniker Source Decay for his sound-based projects.