Ann Shelton, Room Room (detail), 2008. Image courtesy of the artist.  

 

ROOM ROOM : Ann Shelton

5 September - 4 October 2008 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

Photography has always been about preservation, the documentation of a moment or place which would otherwise go by unnoticed. In Ann Shelton’s ROOM ROOM the progression of time was stilled, and the passing of a physical place was marked for the record. Halting time in this way not only allows us to contemplate these images at length, but to recognise a visual conundrum presented by the artist. The rooms here were photographically recorded for posterity, yet they are also altered, inverted or mirrored images of their appearance in reality.

The photographs which made up ROOM ROOM show the Salvation Army’s former Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Facility on Rotoroa Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. Established in the early 1900s the facility was a purpose-built centre for rehabilitation, operational until its last residents left in December 2005. Currently leased by the Salvation Army to a charitable trust, Rotoroa Island is making a transition to a conservation estate. Ann Shelton spent time on the island after the occupants had gone, photographing the one-time women’s wing of the Phoenix building pending its demolition.

ROOM ROOM’s fourteen large scale images depicted the bare interiors of vacated rooms as if through the eye of a Claude glass, a small portable convex mirror used as an aid to painting during the 18th century. This mirror allowed the artist to reduce a scene and make it easier to paint. Taking the round shape of the Claude glass, Shelton’s works appeared literally stretched over a convex mirror; the photographic image a reversed version of the real. These images present rooms we cannot enter. An impassable threshold is drawn through the use of a two-dimensional, fixed point perspective. The rooms themselves no longer exist as we see them here; they have been decommissioned and may already have been demolished. Even the apparently ‘documentary-style’ veracity of the work has involved judicious manipulation and augmentation. Tantalising in their keyhole-like format, they offer the possibility of rest, of safety and stillness, yet at the same time a claustrophobic narrowness of focus.

In ROOM ROOM the images’ convex shape dramatised their surreal nature, slight distortion of perspective heightening the sense of an internalised or imagined scenario. The tondo format is not used superficially; as art historian Steve Edwards points out, the camera lens actually gives a circular image, it is Western painting conventions which have influenced photography’s conformity to a rectangular image.[1] Mimicking the pinhole of light in a camera (the ultimate ‘room with a view’), these round images suggest enclosure, but also the scope of vision. In his introduction to Contemporary New Zealand Photographers Gregory O’Brien writes ‘Besides being a small room, the camera has lately become an enormous one – a warehouse or factory in which ideas are manufactured and stored.’[2] In Shelton’s project the depicted rooms ultimately offer a view which is wider, more introspective and more acute than appears on first glance.

Ann Shelton completed her Masters at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 2002. In 2007 her major project a library to scale toured New Zealand and Australia after being awarded the Trust Waikato Contemporary Art Award (2006). Recent group shows include a Collect/project at the Adam Art Gallery, curated by Christina Barton, and Earth Matters at the Auckland City Art Gallery, curated by Natasha Conland. In 2004 she held the Govett-Brewster New Zealand Artist Residency, and during that time produced the solo museum show a kind of sleep, and once more from the street, presented at Starkwhite. Shelton is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland and McNamara Gallery, Wanganui. The artist currently lectures in Fine Art and Photography at Massey University School of Fine Arts in Wellington.

Abby Cunnane

Don't miss out on your copy of the ROOM ROOM publication, available at Parsons Bookshop, Auckland (books@parson.co.nz).

www.annshelton.com


[1] Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2006), p.91.

[2] Gregory O’Brien, ‘A Small Room’, in Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, edited by Lara Strongman, (Auckland: Mountain View Publishing, 2005), p.9.