A very successful Exhibition of 'The Empirical Land' opening for my final honours project. Even sold my first piece in Photospace Gallery Wellington.
The Empirical Land
How can abstract photography encourage us to reconceptualise notions of the New Zealand Landscape?
This photographic exhibition titled ‘The Empirical Land’ encourages us to examine what it means to believe something from experience, rather than theory. These photographs are attempting to deconstruct the conventions of western perspective within the post-contact New Zealand landscape tradition. My work recognises how dominant these systems are and attempts to undermine them, preferring a lack of horizon lines and focal points. Generating a new experience through the removal of these aspects, this new approach manifests within my images. “The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act” (Berger, 11). It is through this way of seeing that I attempt to influence how we perceive the landscape, offering a view more closely observed and potentially felt, rather than distanced images constructed through western perspectival systems.
Photographic truths like most truths rely on the understanding of the world around us and how we exist within it. Using our encountered experiences, we view our surroundings in certain ways. When viewing these photographs our mind automatically tries to figure out what it is we're looking at, searching for the recognisable or the most realistic of a New Zealand landscape.
As a 21st-century female photographer, it has occurred to me that there is a dominant male presence in the art of landscape photography. Through the gaze of fixation, the landscape photographed becomes an abstraction through the act of zooming in. My perspective as a woman uses the camera to capture these fixations in order to displace the masculine eye in my work. To emphasise my perspective as a female landscape photographer I use a delicate approach. Enhancing this approach with the use of black and white tonality, form and scale to best represent the landscape I am observing. Through this practice the photograph mediates the experience of the natural world, challenging the way we perceive landscapes within New Zealand.
Berger, John. Ways of seeing. Penguin UK, 2008.
