Arrive at Art
Fiona Amundsen
Recent Acquisition June 2006.
Natasha Conland, curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art GAllery, Toi o Tamaki, writes in On Show, 2006:
These new Chartwell Collection acquisitions are part of an ongoing series of photographs depicting public squares from Fiona Amundsen, who has been included in several recent publications on New Zealand photography. Public squares are purportedly lively places, peopled and active, yet Amundsen takes photographs without human presence. Using the categorical approach of a researcher, she appears to be data collecting. The purpose of her impeccably detailed images remains fascinatingly enigmatic.
Fiona Amundsen
Garden Place, Hamilton, 09.08.2003, 7.16
colour photograph
Fiona Amundsen
Garden Place, Hamilton, 02.08.2003, 7.19
colour photograph
Fiona Amundsen
Garden Place, Hamilton, 21.06.2003, 7.44
colour photograph
Fiona Amundsen: Artist Statement
Garden Place
2003-04
"a mode of representation that is simultaneously fixed and transitory, that draws nature while allowing it to draw itself, that both reflects and constitutes its object, that partakes equally of the realms of nature and culture. It would seem that the desire to photograph is here being projected - as its own nomenclature will later confirm (photography: light writing, light writing itself) - in terms of a will to power that is able to write itself even as it is written."1
Garden Place is an ongoing series of photographs of public squares executed in a similar manner to my previous bodies of work. Although Garden Place uses a parallel constructed frame, the methodology has shifted. The images possess a casualness to them, a sort of sloppiness which manifests itself in the filling-up of the frame. As a result, Garden Place creates a beautiful and contradictory tension between this deliberate compositional decision, and the absence of any real human referent. The photographs do not speak openly of anything, their narrative is unclear. Rather, they point at things silently while slowly unfolding.
Garden Place references theory concerned with the actual medium of photography, instead of its representational qualities. My interest here is twofold: by engaging with how photography socially gathers meaning, Garden Place picks apart how space itself is culturally constructed. All of my previous series have systematically addressed space - the photographs have relied on the viewer's cultural investment in the depicted. The sites of Garden Place have also been carefully emptied, offering only a vestige of experience: the images play with a very real desire to 'know' the photographed site, to culturally indulge in an experience of place. These photographs act as both a typology of space, and of the camera at work. Each photographed site highlights how photography operates as a "distinctive temporal articulation of what it, and therefore we, see."2 Positioned alongside each other, the photographs are similar in appearance, therefore emphasising photography's tautological relationship to reality - referent, or no referent.
Theoretically, Garden Place stems from and is contextualised by typological practices common to both German and New Zealand photography, and by my post-graduate research in anthropology. The latter adopts a roughly ethnographic method of analysis (unfolding and deconstructing these practices) while the former involves critique of photography in action. Although aware of the aesthetic link between my images and recent German photography, Garden Place side-steps this by framing photography as a sort of "strategic failure": it strives for a scientific perfection which is never achievable.3 Unlike the Bechers' mammoth task of 'preserving' modern industry, this project's focus is more ephemeral: endless records of abstracted space, which is then located within specific cultural contexts. Garden Place aspires to the cool neutrality of photography - an important quality in conventional documentary photographic practices - only to undermine itself through a ceaseless documenting of nothing. These images ironically reference the idea of anthropological fieldwork through their fabrication of a passive and active representation, which is used to collect an equally culturally constructed concept of space.
Garden Place is a 'performance' of sorts, one that addresses photography by stripping the medium of its seductive and obvious signifying qualities.4 This work references the grandeur of typological and scientific data collection practices, but it consciously disappoints through its lack of any real concrete subject matter.5 By rigorously acting out 'photography at work', the photographs which make up Garden Place become increasingly removed from the need to use the camera as a representational tool. What is 'represented', instead, is photography itself.
NOTES
1. Batchen, Geoffrey (2001), Each Wild Idea, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 22-3.
2. Ibid., 12.
3. See Anthony Byrt's 'Empty Fragments of a Missing Subject' in Wooden self-published monograph, 2004, pgs 24, 33 for a discussion of this aspect of my practice.
4. Ibid., 13, 24.
5. Ibid., 24.
Artist CV
Solo Exhibitions
2004
Time Trials, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, Australia
Garden Place, The Ramp Gallery, Hamilton
Wooden, McNamara Gallery, Wanganui
2003
Time Trials, The Physics Room, Christchurch
Wooden, West Space Inc, Melbourne, Australia
2001
Pedestrian, Cuckoo, Auckland
Pedestrian, The Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin
Pedestrian, The High Street Project, Christchurch
2000
Pedestrian, The Ramp Gallery, Hamilton
Pedestrian, The Physics Room, Christchurch
1999
Modern, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland
Dwelling, TCBincArt, Melbourne, Australia
1996
Argus, Artspace, Auckland
Spot, La Gonda Arcade, Auckland
Poke, George Fraser Gallery, Auckland
1995
Pheromone, Teststrip, Auckland
Collaborations
1999
Into The International, Fiat Lux, Auckland (with Juan Ruben Reyes)
1997
Polar, High Street Project, Christchurch (with Stella Brennan)
Selected Group Exhibitions
2006
Fiona Amundsen / Christopher Braddock / Jeena Shin, Roger Williams Contemporary, Auckland, 2006 (inaugural exhibition)
2005
Contemporary New Zealand Photography, Starkwhite, Auckland
2004
Ahoy!, Flag Project, Thomas Cook Building flagpole, Hamilton
Water Works, Rm103, Auckland
2003
Cuckoo at the Critical Studies Test Site, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden
Deep Vein Psychosis, Rm103, Auckland
Art Waikato National Art Award, Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton
Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
2002
Xmas Stocking, Kreisler Gallery, New Plymouth
Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Gipsland Art Gallery, Sale
Flora/Fauna, Room 401, Auckland
Art Waikato National Art Award, Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton
Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (curated by Zara Stanhope)
HSP Fund Raiser, The High Street Project, Christchurch
2001
Gift Horse, The Syrup Room, Hamilton
Disposable, The Ramp Gallery, Hamilton
2000
Wonder Lust, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland
Paper, The Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin
Multiples, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland
Art Waikato National Art Award, Hamilton Gardens, Hamilton
1999
TcbincArt Fund Raiser, TCBincArt, Melbourne, Australia
Nostalgia For The Future, Artspace, Auckland
We Really Care, Room 3, Auckland
In Art We Trust: Fiat Lux Fund Raiser, Fiat Lux, Auckland
New Work, The Area Gallery, Auckland
1997
New Work, The Physics Room, Christchurch
1996
100 Bucks, Teststrip, Auckland
Laying It On Thick, Artspace, Auckland
Page Works
2001
Bristol Square, 1997, Log Illustrated
2000
Grey Lynn Primary School Swimming Pool, Auckland, 07/01/00, 0.645, Camera Austria International, # 71
Method, Log Illustrated
1998
Melrose Ave, Pander
1996
Selected Images, The Big Picture
Selected Images, Crossing Over Karagahape Road
Grants
2004
Garden Place, Waikato Institute of Technology Research Grant
2003
Deep Vein Psychosis, Waikato Institute of Technology Research Grant
2002
Wooden, Waikato Institute of Technology Research Grant
Slow Release: Recent Photography from New Zealand, Waikato Institute of Technology Research Grant
2001
Time Trials, Waikato Institute of Technology Research Grant
2000
Pedestrian, Creative New Zealand 'New Work' Grant
Selected Bibliography
Barton, Tina, “Finding the Pattern - The Photographs of Fiona Amundsen”, Art New Zealand, issue 118, Winter2006, p. 46-51
Byrt, Anthony, Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, Lara Strongman (ed.), Mountain View Publishing, 2005, p. 128-135
Byrt, Anthony, Wooden, exhibition catalogue, 2003
Byrt, Anthony, Time Trials, exhibition writing, 2002
Scott, Hanna, “From the series Gastronome”, Ramp magazine (The Velvet Rickshaw), issue 1, April 2004, p. 31-35
Scott, Hanna, “Fiona Amundsen”, New Zealand Journal of Photography, issue 55, Winter 2004
For more information contact Roger Williams Contemporary
enquiries@rogerwilliamscontemporary.com
