The exhibition, Rooms found only in the home, has been developed and toured by Dunedin Public Art Gallery and draws extensively on the Gallery’s collection and that of the artist.
It is paired with A RESTORATION, a 15-minute, two-channel video installation by British artist Elizabeth Price, the first occasion that work by the award-winning artist has been seen in New Zealand.
Marie Shannon has been making photographs for 30 years, and more recently has expanded her practice to videos.
Adam Art Gallery director Christina Barton says: “Marie Shannon may not be a household name, but she should be. She’s an artist with a clear and consistent practice. Her photographs demonstrate her incredible construction skills and reveal her wry imagination.”
Shannon’s photographs draw on her home life and her most intimate relationships. They capture simple, everyday moments such as reading by the fire, going to the supermarket, the memorabilia of family life and the layout of domestic spaces.
They also relate to her life as an artist, which she shared with her partner and fellow artist, the late Julian Dashper.
Adam Art Gallery curator Stephen Cleland says Shannon is of a generation of artists who were trained in the 1980s to question the assumption that a photograph could not lie. She resists this notion by making photographs that stand in for her reality. Her images either show the models she makes from simple materials such as fur, pipe-cleaners and felt, or serve as the ground on which words appear.
“Rather than reveal herself, she models a world of her own making,” Stephen says.
He says Elizabeth Price shares Shannon’s under-the-radar public profile.
“Although she won the Turner Prize—Britain’s most prestigious award—in 2012, few may be familiar with her practice. This is largely because as an artist, she prefers to immerse herself in each project that can take years of intense research to realise.”
Price has delved deep into archives and museum collections to find material to create sensuous and immersive video installations that revisit historical events and reimagine historical sites. The visual imagery is complemented by lush soundtracks and written and spoken narratives.
A RESTORATION offers local audiences an introduction to her practice. This particular work draws on collections from the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums, which are world-renowned for their art, archaeology and ethnography collections and scholarship.
After winning a commission to make a work based on these collections, Price became intrigued by the archives of Sir Arthur Evans who was responsible for the excavations of the Minoan palace complex at Knossos on Crete.
Christina says Price’s video installation uses Evans’ historical records and images of the objects to “reflect on our very human desire to restore the past by preserving its material traces.
“I am excited to see Shannon and Price’s works together. Both understand the power objects and images hold as historical vestiges, but they also give new life to such things through their constructive processes. There is a playfulness, poignancy and charge to both their practices.”
Rooms found only in the home and A RESTORATION are on view at the Adam Art Gallery 28 April - 24 June 2018.