Southern white wilderness

Joyce Campbell, Anne Noble, Connie Samaras: Antarctica
Gus Fisher
8 May - 20 June 2009

Two New Zealanders and an American team up for this show of Antarctic images, one that has been shown in bigger, more sprawling versions (such as at the Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch), but which is particularly focussed at Gus Fisher, in its large oblong gallery.

It’s a snappy, vibrant presentation, with three high banners (photographs of icefalls) dominating the end wall. Six images each from Campbell and Samaras, and fourteen (some small, arranged in a grid) from Noble.

Many of the photographs explore humour based on architecture. Samaras’ four images of the Amundsen–Scott base show a huge boxlike dwelling with walls of compressed bison board. Mock crenulations are painted on the edge of its roof (a fake castle) and vertical black rectangles make up windows. Noble has an image of visitors examining a large photographic mural of an ice shelf in a museum in San Diego, and another shot in Wilhelmina Bay, where only ice on the ship’s railings indicates with certainty that this image is of the real thing.

Campbell has a small daguerreotype on a horizontal lid, projecting out from the wall, featuring a crevasse breaking open the flat horizontal ice. This joke seems to be more about the exhibition space that it is shown in, than any ice-dominated wasteland.

Other highlights are Campbell’s gorgeous gelatin silver image of morning light streaming over jagged peaks, and Noble’s shot of an aircraft runway, photographed from the air. Within the vast white expanse, the only clue to the scale is a tiny black flag stretched between two poles – positioned in the photograph’s centre.

For some, Samaras’ video loop of a seal surfacing in a blowhole will be a major treat. The bewhiskered blubbery mammal surfaces in front of a stationary tripod and wheezily expels from its lungs all stale air - before taking several deep breaths to recharge and then dive. It is amazing footage, poignant in the way the blinking, bleary-eyed animal suddenly emerges from the watery depths to look straight at the camera while catching its breath, and then three minutes later to plummet back.

Above image from Connie Samaras.

LA flora

Joyce Campbell: Crown Coach Botanicals
Two Rooms
18 September - 18 October 2008

In this extraordinary exhibition we see six small unique Ambrotype photographs on glass plates, and thirty much larger works, prints on paper, taken in small editions off wet-plate Ambrotypes. These strange blurred and specked images are of plants (all useful and sort after species) Campbell has found in the Los Angeles region where she now lives. Looking at them is like going back in time a hundred and fifty years.

This is intended, for it is part of a massive botanical documentation project where the specimens function as an inventory and map of the historical movement of various communities within that great Californian city. Campbell uses a truck as a mobile field darkroom, making her Ambrotypes on location, and recording where she finds the plants (now growing as ‘weeds’), figuring out what they were used for, and by whom.

Yet despite this preoccupation with history one wonders why this artist is being a replicator? She doesn’t need to dabble in nostalgia (it is embedded in the visual results of her research) when her track record shows she can be an innovative inventor of new image making methods. Here she is a mere virtuoso. Albeit a scholarly one.

Though Campbell is recreating a very old method, instead of pushing the medium like say Stephen Pippin, the images are undeniably mesmerising. The specimens, varying in shape, texture and density, are seen through poured upon and chemically stained glass so that marbled bubbled blobs, streaks and blemishes float in front of the vegetation, but gravitating towards the edges of each plate. These technical ‘deformities’ are visually compelling, and if she were to tell us the details of what these plants represent to various groups of people, perhaps that might detract from their mystique.

After all Campbell could do the same documentary project with modern equipment, aiming at crystal-clear, coloured images - but she is deliberately rejecting that. She wants images that visually breathe ‘history’ so they serve as a sort of ‘archaeological’ data that provides information. That brings with it a sort of sentimental reminiscing that invariably accompanies the method, a pining nostalgia (call it 'melancholy') that cannot be removed.

And Time stood still

On Show: 2008
Bath St Gallery
12 June - 5 July 2008

As photography shows go, this is a very odd exhibition organised by the journal Photoforum, because although there is some wonderful work included – especially by Darren Glass and Joyce Campbell – it gives a staid and limited notion of what photographic practice can be.

A lot of the work here could have come straight out of The Active Eye, a New Zealand photography survey exhibition that toured this country in 1975. A huge amount of change within the medium has occurred since then, but apart from the colour you wouldn’t think so from this show. There is no digitally modified photography (eg. Jae Hoon Lee, Gavin Hipkins, Megan Jenkinson), no extravagant props (eg Boyd Webb, Christine Webster), no conceptual adventurousness (eg.Layla Rudneva–Mackay).

Instead it usually dwells on landscape and the prosaic urban, subject-matter now that is pretty tiresome. Basically documentary in focus, it fixates on the passing of time and loss of buildings, individuals and communities. Nothing wrong with that in small doses, but it is restricted.

Yet once you understand that New Zealand photography is a hell of a lot wider in scope than this small cross-section, then checking out these 14 artists is fun. Glass and Campbell, as I’ve indicated, make extraordinary photographs and their work here is better than what is included in Close-Up at the Gus Fisher (tastier images for Glass, more intimate scale for Campbell). David Cook’s night-time colour shots have a subtle hallucinatory quality caused by the chromatic wavelength of the lighting, and Robyn Hoonhout’s glowing lightboxes depicting unclothed elderly women are beautiful and courageous (from the models’ viewpoint).

There are other wonderful images. Bruce Connew’s prismatic photographs are intriguing with their vaguely pointillist hazy colour, and Gary Blackman’s droll ‘Tiger Chair at Piano Farm,Taieri’ conjures up pictures of circuses and sleeping domestic felines.

There is some excellent work here, but overall not as exciting as it should and could be.

Images (ascending from bottom) from Darren Glass, Gary Blackman, David Cook, Bruce Connew,Robyn Hoonhout, Joyce Campbell

Closer than close

Close-up: contemporary contact prints
Gus Fisher
31 May – 5 July 2008

Paul McNamara (of the Wanganui dealership) has selected and organised this touring exhibition of contact prints, featuring nine artists, and the result is impeccable. With the show comes a natty little catalogue containing a nice explanation of what contact prints are by Te Papa’s Athol McCredie, and great comments from the nine contact-printers themselves.

The work is gorgeous, and surprisingly varied. In fact probably more than McNamara intended because Gus Fisher have augmented the show with works from the University of Auckland Collection. That means including enlargements. The show does look spiffy in GF’s awkward oblong room, but McNamara’s concept has been compromised.

Despite the peculiarity of this – you might as well throw McCredie’s commentary in the rubbish tin – one of the interloping works, Mark Adams’ images of Milford Sound, is sensational, and worth all the trouble of a hike down Shortland Street.

As you’d expect, McNamara has his own particular take on these artists. Personally I prefer say Wayne Barrar’s colour work and Joyce Campbell’s underwater images (but they are probably not appropriate), but McNamara's combinations are satisfying. It’s wonderful to see a body of Darren Glass photographs instead of his camera/sculptures and to get a bunch of Haru Sameshima images too. Aberhart is starting to get overexposed in Auckland town now and more Ben Cauchi images would have provided a better balance.

There are lots of very delicately toned, crisp images to marvel about here. Not one to miss.

(See images on the McNamara site. The image above is by Haruhiko Sameshima.)