City Gallery

Past exhibition

Ann Shelton: Room Room

5 September–4 October 2008

Wellington photographer Ann Shelton documents rooms in a former drug and alcohol rehab centre on Rotoroa Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. Established by the Salvation Army in 1910, it operated until December 2005. The artist photographed the bare vacated interiors as if through a Claude glass—a small portable convex mirror used in the eighteenth century as a landscape-painting aid. Her wide angled elegiac views present the rooms as places of productive isolation.