John Hurrell – 24 June, 2023

Four talented artists of considerable repute, each with their own special way of utilising a camera, in this Two Rooms show that uses the whole gallery, comment on the significant historic site of early European/Māori contact that they visited together: Dusky Sound (Tamatea) in Fiordland. Or perhaps, also commenting on the history of photography itself, and occasionally, even the history of painting. The exposures were created in 1995, and many of the prints here, much later. To help provide contextual technical information, the four unusual cameras used are presented in two vitrines.

Mark Adams‘ contributions mostly consist of rhythmical panoramas of jutting angular islands and small receding inlets made by butting three images together. Apparently some of the other shots of dense bush reveal the remains of stumps from chopped off trunks used by William Wales (an astronomer who came with Cook) to build a small temporary observatory to enable tracking the transit of Venus.

In his images Adams references two earlier artists: the painter, William Hodges (who visited the site with Cook in 1773): and the photographer, Russell Duncan (who visited in 1910). To be more specific, Adams accordingly looked closely at Cascade Cove and Astromoner’s Point. In some of his b/w images using 10 inch by 8 inch film, wind-jostled ferns and leaves create sweeping curved traces and transparent blurs. There is a deliberate antiquated ambience.

Like Mark Adams, Haru Sameshima presents discrete framed photographic units under glass—in both cases in order to separate the weather particularities of specific exposure times—but Adams has butted his adjacent vistas together in triplets so they overlap in the viewer’s mind without physically merging. With Sameshima they are kept physically and chronologically separate as single-imaged artworks, so you can ponder individual shifts in light touching surface fluid or perspectival angles of forms. We see the evanescent effects of rippled water on shadow and reflection, the light or lack of light on liquid planes, and transitory reflected inverted echoes countering nearby solid sources. The slight changes in tidal depth within Pickersgill Harbour become apparent, as does a blurry ‘mist’ from the spilling movement (over a long exposure) of choppy waves.

Ian Macdonald and Darren Glass, in their pinned up photographs, haven’t used framed borders (to enforce separation) but physically link images together by digital or analogue means. Sometimes in Glass’s case, the 7 images from 7 exposures from a thrown ring camera (with multiple possible apertures) overlap, but mostly amorphous shadowy fuzzy forms (and very delicate vertical / diagonal striations along the top edge) keep them apart. The result is a looped unravelled horizontal strip of clumped pulsing sea and bush where the beginning re-emerges at the end.

With Ian Macdonald’s two largest coloured rectangles, that on the other hand use 4 inch by 5 inch glass plates, the resulting pairs of smaller exposures are later digitally merged into single continua. They present richly textured and densely layered foliage; and packed blocks of dappled serrated undulating edges or spindly bendy shape—nuanced leafy botanical forms found on Heron Island.

Most of us will never visit this exceptionally remote (comparatively untouched) part of Aotearoa, so these atmospheric images—and Emil McAvoy’s important contextualising essay—are fascinating to ponder. Though thoroughly (semiotically) mediated, the show is mysterious by virtue of the featured location, as well as being extremely informative.

John Hurrell

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