Much has been made of Ann Shelton’s role of tending to the gardens of history. Her photographs of poignant locations are peopleless, but marked by people--those whose stories have been neglected by the landscapers of the past and memory. All the same, it is Shelton’s mirroring couplets that make me think twice. I begin to wonder why she does it...
The repetition and reflection in works such as Wintering, after A Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge 2008 create delicate symmetrical patters that seem to fold open from a central spine, like a Rorschach ink spot. The mired images cast attention on the geometric components of the image, momentarily lifting the image from its role as signifier.4 All this abstraction and patterning from a medium still so often perceived as a truthful transcriber of reality. It feels like a little scientific proof: the photographic process mirrors reality; but the mirroring of the photograph does not bring back reality, it just continues the simulacrum, ad infinitum. It is as if Shelton is demonstrating the effects of photography; exposing the artifice of her medium.
There is something uniquely beautiful about this symmetry imposed on the chaos of nature. The type of beauty adored by Neoclassical gardeners and there can be no denying that Shelton's images are beautiful. Still, the gap between the two mirrored photographs seems to create a sublimely destabilising vortex, inducing a feeling of vertigo.5 It is a space were emotion and imagination begin to work on perception and the subjectivity of perspective is heightened. Still, Shelton's photographs could just be reflecting this mood, along with the subject matter, from the neighboring Van der Velden that acts as its inspiration.
The whole exhibition is diptychs; it is almost like being in a hall of mirrors, everything reappears and repeats—before and after; back and front; side by side. The paintings that can be seen in Shelton's 'Artist Unknown' series are installed en mass in an adjoining gallery space. Shelton's doubling demands 'look, now look again', drawing out these authorless paintings to reappear in public life. Then Shelton continues to command second looks and rethinking through repetition with the 'Back of Painting' series, which shows the reverse of the paintings that are hanging right alongside. This twofold structure is a form that seems to enable Shelton to state her case twice over, as if to make up for past omissions.
Shelton's doubling demonstrates the partial, artificial and subjective nature of photography and by extension all forms of documentation and record keeping that build a collective memory. Repetition and reflection serve her purpose of working the never ending battle against the arbitrariness of the archive, although she is at the same time caught by its desire for completeness.6
4. Pound, Francis, The reflecting archive, Rim Books, 2006, p. 13
5. Galbraith, Heather, 'Document meets drama: Ann Shelton's A kind of sleep', Art New Zealand, Spring 2005, n116, p74.
6. Pound, ibid, p.13
Published in Eyeline issue 69, 2010, p. 84 as a part of a two part review, with Andrea Bell, on the exhibition Ann Shelton: once more with feeling Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago 6 December 2008 - 24 January 2009
