Mirror City is Harry Culy’s ‘gothic love letter’ to his hometown Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Returning after several years living abroad, Culy found the city strange and alien. The project is an attempt to come to terms with this ‘new’ environment, reconcile his memories with his current experiences, and speak to a broader, collective state of […]
Read more "Harry Culy: Mirror City"
Professor Wanley’s lecherous admiration of a portrait of a beautiful woman in a gallery widow is one of the key scenes of film noir. Hypnotic hold broken by a familiar reflection in the glass, Wanley spins around to find the subject of the portrait materialised in the flesh and returning his gaze. A series of […]
Read more "Women in the Window: Joan Bennett, Cindy Sherman, Casa Susanna"
Harry Culy was four years old when Hiroshi Sugimoto visited Aotearoa in 1990. The Japanese-American photographer made one of his signature seascapes at Napier’s Maraenui Beach, not far from the farm owned by Culy’s grandmother. Culy regularly visited the farm as a child, and now revisits and reimagines these experiences for his project Rose Hill. A […]
Read more "News from the Sun: Harry Culy"
It is not enough for me just to gaze onto the world. —Justine Varga[1] Justine Varga’s use of the latticed window takes us back, right back to the origins of photography, and back to her own recent past—the controversy surrounding her winning the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture in 2017. Her winning work, Maternal […]
Read more "News from the Sun: Justine Varga"
Photography is ever present in J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Vaughan photographs car crashes as case studies for a new psychopathology in Crash (1973), the tower block’s inhabitants document the social chaos they succumb to in High Rise (1975), while Super-Cannes (2000) chronicles a modern world where surveillance cameras hang ‘like gargoyles’.[1] In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), […]
Read more "News from the Sun: Introduction"
J.G. Ballard was exasperated by David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photo collages. ‘There is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken’, he wrote. ‘The collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot’. Seeing only an affront to perception and photography itself, Ballard insisted that ‘the human eye is not faceted … […]
Read more "News from the Sun: Shaun Waugh"
Cindy Sherman collects. She trawls flea markets, thrift stores, and fashion houses for the clothes, wigs, and accessories used in her performances to camera. These performances inhabit character types themselves derived from movies and television, art, and fashion. She also collects other people’s photographs. This exhibition draws from Sherman’s collection of found photographs, scrapbooks and […]
Read more "Other People’s Photographs: Cindy Sherman’s Found Albums and Scrapbooks"
AARON LISTER 