John Hurrell – 5 July, 2010

As part of this year’s Photography Festival this selection of four Godkin artists presents very varied approaches to the medium. Lisa Benson dominates it with over half the works on display, hers made during a recent residency in China. Her eight photographs mostly play on the mysterious intimate qualities of the Chinese landscape in relation to human scale, its clinging wintry mist and the steep, round topped, thimblelike quality of the hillocks that make houses perched on their tops look like underwater models in a fish tank.

Benson exudes a visiting outsider’s sense of wonder, an excited marvelling at the magic of the fog-shrouded landscape. This extends even indoors to a bathhouse where the enclosed steaming pool has adjacent outcrops of jagged towering rocks and cascading waterfalls - all part of the seemingly unique ‘Chinese’ morphology of landforms.

Jennifer French’s two contributions are images of the current building renovations in progress at Auckland Art Gallery, showing the demolition rubble and bare internal structure as the exhibiting spaces get severely modified. Her still, contemplative images are taken in semi-darkness, with light streaming in through distant doorways, generating a sense of tunnelling depth that becomes a metaphor for time and perhaps historical change.

The images by Esther Leigh continue her ongoing interest in atmospheric spatial ambiguity through photographing props (such as papier mache ‘rocks’, feather boas, strings of pearls and hat-pins) through murky sheets of frosted glass. Earlier works have looked as if staged underwater but these are slowly becoming more landscapish -as if looking in from a windswept cliff top, and with hollow buildings like Greek temples that can be looked through. The clarity and (albeit dark) precision carefully provided by French is wilfully rejected in these bright romantic vistas by Leigh.

Miranda Parkes is known for her puffy pillowlike paintings of colourful stripes but she also occasionally makes videos and photographs. The three examples of the latter here look coincidentally like documentary photographs of the installations of Sydney artist Nike Savvas (many coloured balls on lines suspended in space) but now superimposed over stills of a WWII movie like ‘The Longest Day’ - with a soldier staring out of a church window.

There are odd images, lollyish with thousands of bubblegum balls hovering horizontally in front of acted out life and death dramas. Spatially intriguing - like the rest of the show.

John Hurrell

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