City Gallery

Past exhibition

Lucien Rizos: Where I Find Myself

20 May–19 June 2005

On the northern wall of his Hataitai living room, Lucien Rizos is constantly rearranging photos, drawings, photocopies, and other material in an everchanging assemblage. The display is rich in surprising juxtapositions and unusual contrasts, linkages and rephrasings, visual and verbal puns. Rizos has rephotographed and reworked famous images by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and appropriated nondescript details from other images. A violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, he practices in his living room, spending long periods of time facing ‘the wall’. While his musical career is predicated on discipline, rigor, and technique, his approach to photography is more curious and experimental. For this show, Rizos transposes 'the wall' into the Gallery.

An adjacent gallery space contains another ‘wall’ of photographs, this time drawing on snapshots and portraits that Rizos has gathered from the homes of his family. The ‘family room’ is also about echoes and reiteration: people disappear and reappear, family resemblances emerge, narratives of emigration and resettlement are hinted at.

This show is about the conversation between the two ‘walls’ in Rizos’s consciousness, neither of which is exactly public or private. It's about the dialogue between the family snapshot and the artistic image.