AUT - AUT Pilot Project: Familiarities
- ArionWhere applying and enrolled students can access AUT course information, check your enrolment status, make fee payments, update your personal details and view your academic results.
- AUTOnlineOnline access to course resources and learning activities through AUT's central learning management system.
- UnicentralUniCentral is the AUT University Student Portal. Here you will find useful information about you as a student and quicklinks to all the important online systems you will need to use while studying at AUT University.
AUT Pilot Project: Familiarities
AUT PILOT Project (BVA Students year 3)
Familiarities
Melissa Butters, Rachel Dredge, Jamie-Lee Harding, Nicola McNabb, Sharon Russell
Opening July 25, 5pm
July 25 - 27, 2007
Gallery Three
ALL THINGS COLD *
Familiarities
As the title of this exhibition indicates, the works by Melissa Butters, Rachel Dredge, Jamie-Lee Harding, Nicola McNabb and Sharon Russell explore in different ways the notion of familiarity as a relationship between a person and an object, a person and his or her history, a person and his or her environment. What is familiar to one person is not necessarily familiar to another person, and the more intimate the relationship is, the more unfamiliar it will be for somebody else, who is not part of this intimate relationship. Which means, that the notion of familiarity intrinsically carries the notion of its opposite, the strange, the alienated, the uncanny.
Nicola McNabb covers the walls with delicate, undulating lines. There is no obvious connection between the wall drawings and the architecture, no site-specificity, and no point of reference in the outer world. The drawings go on like a flow of thoughts or associations, loosely connected, but beyond logical coherence. Fragile and subtle, the drawings seem to be traces of the mind’s movements as such, rather than the inscription of the thoughts’ content – the mind’s intimate dialogue with itself.
Jamie-Lee Harding’s newspaper cut-outs, which document the career of her father, a Rugby player, remnants of the Carlaw Park stadium, where he used to play, and photographs of the abandoned stadium deal with a private family history. The transfer of an image from the photographic original to the medium of drawing and subsequently of etching represents stages of appropriation and alienation. While the works solely concentrate on the father’s figure, there is hardly any trace of a close relationship between father and daughter. The father is far away in the public sphere, and the works can be read as attempts to become familiar with that person, who is close and estranged at the same time.
Sharon Russel photographs knitted dolls which all bear the same kind of stereotypical smile, little red nipples and pubic hair. By shooting the dolls in close-ups, Sharon Russel creates images of disquieting ambiguity. Without any sexual or pornographic content, the images contain a strong and discomforting feeling of perversion and sexual abuse. As they blend the innocence of a child’s doll with the allusions on an idolised fetish, a child’s toy with the adult’s gaze, the obvious mindlessness of this perennial smile with this concomitantly sexually loaded and repulsive positions, the photographs transport these poor products into a sphere, which is toxicated by different layers of hidden histories, barred desires and untold tragedies.
Rachel Dredge takes pictures of her domestic environment. Carefully composed, her photographs move away from the daily mess in our home and construct rigidly balanced images of order. It is hard to say whether these images are also images of beauty. The shiny surface of a socket, the micro structures on a wall, little traces of scratching – Rachel Dredge’s concentrated gaze on the often overseen details of our mundane world gives them an uncomfortable presence, which lets the familiar, banal object appear as something almost magically loaded with undiscovered meaning.
Melissa Butters, finally, who also works with the medium photography, stages events in the nights of empty suburbia, a place of nowhere, familiar to all of us. In the centre of the image a woman, leaning against a tree and looking upwards, her neck and face lightened by a white-blue light, which’s source cannot be located. This cold light contrasts with the green-yellow light of a street lamp – two modes of artificial light, one generic, the other specific and almost super-natural. We watch a scenery of an epiphany, an occurrence beyond the realm of the ordinary and far beyond the sphere of the familiar.
But, like with all the works in the exhibition, may be it is just us, who are closed off from this event, who do not have access to this personal and highly private occurrence, happening in the public space, to whom it looks uncanny, disquieting, scary. Familiarity depends from the point of view and the degree of involvement. And what looks strange for us, might be the other persons’ daily occupation, their everyday world, their source of pleasure or even their object of love.
Leonhard Emmerling
* The Stranglers, Strange Little Girl, Laid Back, 2002.