Fantastic Voyage
The Photographs of Arthur Tress
14 February - 13 April 1997
This major touring exhibition of the works of the veteran American photographer Arthur
Tress comes to Christchurch on its world tour through India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan,
Mongolia and Australia. After leaving New Zealand it will continue on to Canada. It was
developed and funded by the Arts America Program of the US Information Agency as a tribute
to over 36 years work by one of America's most prodigious and diversified photographers.
Richard Lorenz, an independent curator from Berkeley, California selected the 100 images
for this major retrospective of Tress's career. Dating from 1956 to 1992 they provide a
fantastic voyage through the major concepts, concerns and individual preoccupations of
this artist.
Works from each series chart his path from real life images of primitive African
societies to the recent manipulated images of futuristic time travel. What appears to be
documentary reportage can be so subjective or so fabricated that it subverts the genre and
generates a visual world in which the incongruous dualities of beauty and violence are
seen to coalesce.
Gradually Tress' work changed from the anecdotal to the universal as he 'strove for
theatrical metaphors for the dark mysteries of life'. Using still-life assemblages he
tackled issues thrown up by the intimations of destiny. He examined Western economic and
scientific culture and its struggles to enter the next millennium without destroying
itself, and the inner space of mind and body as related to the quantum energies of distant
galaxies. Fantastic Voyage also takes us through Tress's narrative serial images which are
often based on the creation myths, into eroticism, the nature of the artist, ecology and
the universal search for enlightenment.
Arthur Tress was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He began photography as
a youth and after graduating from college in 1962 travelled widely
photographing cultures and customs in Egypt, Mexico, India and
Europe. Tress returned to the United States in 1968 and during
that year had his first solo exhibition in New York. He has published
ten books of his photographs. The most recent was the 1990 "Requiem
for a Paper Weight" which is the final part in his trilogy
on one man's journey towards enlightenment, told in a fascinating
neo-surrealistic spectrum of stunning photographic images.
This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in the Botanic Gardens.
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