Redeye

Ann Shelton
6 June - 6 July 1997

A carnival of colour, Redeye, by Auckland photographer Ann Shelton, will expose Annex visitors to 'an ongoing social diary in photographs'.

Shelton finds her accomplices within the Auckland art scene - at gallery openings, performances and underground events. Capturing raw, gritty snapshot images, her work explores the voyeuristic nature of the relationship between the photographic subject and the viewer. Redeye is an unflinching, unwashed surveillance, homing in on what critic Justin Paton has described as the 'tribal rites of the young and restless'

Shelton's images are organised on a visual, rather than a narrative basis, and reveal the formal concerns of colour, shape, texture and content in several large, variously sized blocks. She exhibits her work in the form of A1 sized lazer copies, and would prefer her photographs to be seen en masse, with each image building upon and vying with the next, rather than as a series of isolated, self-contained statements.

Relentlessly defying the assumed veracity of the photograph, Shelton does not believe that a single picture can claim to reveal concrete truths about its subject. Described by the Senior Curator of Photography at the Auckland City Art Gallery, Ron Brownson, as 'some of the most inventive and risk taking in recent art in New Zealand' this is work which celebrates the perversity of the photographic medium, with all of its imagined intimacies and studied spontaneity.

This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Contemporary Art Annex in the Arts Centre.