Adam Art Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions: Rooms found only in the home, a survey of the work of Auckland-based artist Marie Shannon developed and toured by Dunedin Public Art Gallery and A RESTORATION, 2016, a two-channel video installation by British artist Elizabeth Price originally commissioned by The Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums at the University of Oxford.

            

Marie Shannon: Rooms found only in the home
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi
28 April – 24 June 2018

Rooms found only in the home is the first to survey the photographic and video work of Marie Shannon, an artist who has been exhibiting since the mid 1980s. Drawing extensively on holdings of Shannon’s works in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection and the artist’s personal archive, the exhibition explores the intersecting spheres of Shannon’s personal and professional life. Ranging from the early 1980s to the present day, the exhibition provides an opportunity to review her evolving practice and its common and recurring themes and threads.

Shannon graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1983, at a time when the conventions of photography as a fine art practice were being tested and challenged. Though exposed to the logic of documentary photography and modernist notions such as ‘the decisive moment’, she resisted such approaches. Instead she tested the transparency of the image and its claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, by collaging photographs together in ways that registered slippages and changes in perspective, and by constructing then photographing hand-made models of domestic and studio environments that were clearly makeshift and imaginary. Though closely tied to her own life, this approach rendered the documentation of everyday experience as somehow second-hand; by re-making her world she set the stage for a new self-consciousness about the nature of photography as a creative practice.

Many of Shannon’s works hinge on relationships – her family life, her relationship with her partner the late Julian Dashper, and with other artists with whom she has come in contact.  She processes these by making simple observations about art-making and the thought-experiments and conversations that inflect her life and interactions as an artist and a home-maker. Over time, the concept of distance has come to play a more acute role in Shannon’s work, with the effects of separation and the passage of time becoming prevalent concerns. Her video works and recent photography introduce an archival tendency – a process of cataloguing the contents, absences, and memories that shape her daily present.

Marie Shannon (New Zealand, born 1960) has been included in several major exhibitions including: Imposing narratives: beyond the documentary in recent New Zealand photography, Wellington (1989); Headlands: thinking through New Zealand art, Sydney & Wellington (1992); the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (1996); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (1998); the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1998), AC Projects, New York (2000). In 2001, she accompanied Julian Dashper to Marfa, Texas where she spent time as a guest of the Chinati Foundation. Since 2009, after Dashper’s untimely death, she has been sorting his studio and archives and is involved in organising an ongoing series of exhibitions from his Estate for Michael Lett in Auckland. Marie Shannon is represented by Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland, and Hamish McKay, Wellington.

Adam Art Gallery thanks Cam McCracken, Lucy Hammonds and Lauren Gutsell, all of Dunedin Public Art Gallery, for their assistance in the realisation of this exhibition.

Elizabeth Price: A RESTORATION
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi
28 April – 24 June 2018

Elizabeth Price is known for her moving image works made specifically for gallery environments. These draw on archives and museum collections and often include scrolling texts and computerised voice-overs set against musical backgrounds. In 2012 Price won the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition HERE at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. In 2014, she won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award to create a commission for The Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford.

A RESTORATION, 2016, is the result of this commission. It is a 15-minute, two channel video installation drawing on the archives of The Ashmolean’s second Keeper, Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), an archaeologist responsible for excavating the Minoan palace complex at Knossos on the island of Crete. Re-animating his collection of drawings, plans, photographs and artefacts, and combining these with digitised photographs of objects from these museums’ collections, Price creates an evolving narrative that imagines how relics from a distant past might be given new life as digital images in the virtual domain of a computer’s storage system. To her edited compilation of images, she adds sounds and words that bring to a dramatic climax this latest process of compilation, cataloguing and arrangement that she conceives as being undertaken by a female ‘chorus’ of museum administrators. She leaves viewers with a renewed sense of the impossibility of ever truly ‘restoring’ the past, reminding us of the paradox that museum professionals and scholars inevitably distort history even as they seek to preserve it.

Elizabeth Price (British, born 1966) has exhibited her work in solo presentations including Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Stedelijk, Amsterdam; The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Hayward Gallery, London; Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York; Berlin Natural History Museum, and Chicago Institute of Art. She is working on exhibitions for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2018; Nottingham Contemporary and the Whitworth, Manchester 2019, and The Void, Derry, in 2020. Elizabeth Price is represented by Grimm Gallery, Brussels, Amsterdam and New York.

Adam Art Gallery thanks EP Studio for their assistance in the realisation of Elizabeth Price’s installation.

Please see our Calendar for events related to these exhibitions.

Media release for Marie Shannon and Elizabeth Price exhibitions here.