In ‘once more with feeling’, Ann Shelton produced a new body of work in response to items from the University of Otago’s Hocken Collection. To reflect the nature of this exhibition, this review will be two-part: with one response following the other.
For some time, Ann Shelton’s practice has located historical narratives within the contemporary landscape. Revisiting sites of cultural significance, Shelton’s photographs present quiet moments for pause and reflection. Her recent interest in collections, as demonstrated by her series ‘library to scale’1, has instigated further research into the museum collection as a site of constructed histories. Shelton first subverted the Collection by uncovering rack after rack of works by ‘unknown’ artists in the Hocken’s storage facilities. It is as though she feels a sense of duty to represent these lost artists. Their presence in this exhibition is based on their otherwise decided absence, emphasising the subjective construction of the art historical canon.
Several works in ‘once more with feeling’ illustrate Shelton’s signature technique of photographing historically significant sites as diptychs, with the landscape reflected upon itself as in a mirror. Curator Natalie Pound maintains that in Shelton’s works, such as Wintering, after A Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge, and Atlantis, Port Gore, Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, this doubling of the image effectively undoes conventional Cartesian perspective, and ‘the primacy of vision.’2 Given that Shelton is working from historical texts in a public collection, this rewriting suggests a re-examination of the originals as cultural constructs.
Another site/work that is re-examined is Seacliff Mental Hospital (1883) after a watercolour by George O’Brien, depicting the original hospital buildings. What was once the largest building in New Zealand, now stands as