Photography / “VIEW2022”. An exhibition by Annette Fisher, Catherine Feint, Fiona Bowring, Greg Stoodley, Isaac Kairouz, Izaak Bink, Jemima Campey, Tom Campbell, Wendy Dawes and Xuequin Yi. At the Huw Davies Gallery until March 5. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

“VIEW” is a PhotoAccess award exhibition which is intended “to showcase some of the region’s most exciting new photographers and photo-media artists”.

Feint’s model of a house is represented as “real” in a set of prints capturing the “house” bathed in light and shade. The prints look as if they capture reality. Cameras can be turned into deceptive devices in the hands of the “unscrupulous”.

Dawes explores aspects of memory with a mix of photography, drawing, and stop motion. The backing papers are repurposed hanging file folders. Dawes stamps these with QR codes, which are functional and draw the viewer into her memories.

Campey examines influencers. If they break a tapu their followers may desert them. Peccant influencers may have to engage in a public and tearful self-abasement along with grovelling apologies. If enough followers forgive them, then it is business as usual. Is this “cancel culture” or are followers exercising legitimate personal power? Campey manipulates the digital videos in such a way as to make me feel as if the apology ritual is visually and emotionally grotesque.

Campbell explores the duality of physical borders and digital ways of crossing them. He uses a split screen technique with verve. The viewer is visually both stopped from moving and hauled off at breakneck speed in the same instant.

Stoodley’s two silver gelatin prints are still but not still. The overall feel has a stillness but the verticals are not vertical and the horizontals are not horizontal. Here there is an impenetrable dark patch while over there we see a blown white patch. A head severed by the crop is juxtaposed with a serene cat.

Fisher exhibits a gritty video of a hotel being demolished. In an age when there is an almost reflexive concern about demolitions, I don’t care about this destruction. The hotel is anonymous modern architecture devoid of an aesthetic, of shared emotions, or of any sense of valued memory. I am on the side of the machines. I enjoy watching the destruction of walls and floors.

Bowring, restricted by covid regulations, explored nearby places, camera in hand. She discovered “Spoonville”. It is redolent of Pooh Corner, of community and of generations sharing. The tableau consists of a large number of wooden spoons of various shapes and sizes decorated and/or painted to look like people. Mature pine trees add a contrasting northern hemisphere Grimm’s touch to the Australian bright light.

Xuequin Yi resonates personally. For this migrant there is a sort of mistiness in visual memories attached to the old place. The details tend to soften. The pictorial relationships tend to drift apart. Meanings tend to blur. Xueqin Yi’s prints catch these shifts wonderfully well.

Bink’s prints are challenging. He examines issues relating to queer representation and how that is bound by hetero culture. Bink creates glyphs. The meanings are not accessible to the viewer. Bink superimposes queer sensitive and macho stereotypes on to a background of glyphs as examples of ways in which hetero culture pushes these stereotypes on to queer culture. I contemplate this and acknowledge the presence of those stereotypes in my hetero way of thinking. I feel in need of a queer-hetero Rosetta Stone.

Kairouz’s installation is immersive. Near and far, light and dark, chiffon and chains compete for the eye. I hardly know where or how to focus. Apart from being a total experience there is much to ruminate about in the symbolism of the parts.

This exhibition is a pictorial island of reason. It offers serious and creative reflections about multiple realities.

These emerging artists are exciting.