GROUP EMERGING SHOW
MAX CREASY
EMIDIO PUGLIELLI
ROBERTA THORNLEY
NAOMI WHITE
Exhibition: 10 February to 6 March 2010
In our first exhibition for 2010 we present four emerging artists working
with the enigmatic auras of photographs and objects.
Max Creasy’s carefully constructed images play between illusion and
representation, between the facsimile and the real. They invite doubt about
the process of photography and the viewer’s relationship to it. His still life
scenes are cast from plaster, hand painted and photographed. The process of
painting interrupts our understanding of the role and effects of light in the
photographic process. This layered construction of the scene creates an
uncertainty in the eye of the viewer.
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With an eye for oddness, and for the tension between domesticity and nature,
Roberta Thornley’s photography explores the obsessive things people do in
their anxious search for perfection and happiness. Her work is both painterly
and cinematic, revealing what seem to be suspended moments in mysterious
unresolved narratives. She says, "I want my photographs to ask questions, and
I want them to be rich with narrative possibilities. At the same time I try to
evoke atmospheres that oscillate between melancholy and desire. It’s a
difficult combination but I keep trying." Roberta Thornley graduated in 2007
from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts.
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Emidio Puglielli has a keen interest in old photographs and their continued
resonance in contemporary society. He collects vernacular photographs to use
and re-image in his work. Their material nature is the main focus; he
addresses the photograph as an object and uses it as a subject. Physical
elements of interest include: paper type, size, decorative edges, but
particularly damage and added text. He is interested in the way these elements
impact the reading of the image. The work is reflexive. It points to itself to
question what photographs are and what they do to and for us.
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Naomi White’s Soap War features a faux bathroom made out of cardboard. On the
mirror a sign says “No more soap girls! It was STILL being wasted”. Her
graduating series Out the Back explores work environments and their effect on
employees. She has re-created the otherwise off limits staff areas using the
packaging material that one might find there. The banal, neutral toned
surroundings, peppered with motivational and instructional signage highlight
the ultimately de-motivating atmosphere of these workplaces. The scenes are
delightfully subversive and frank.
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