Ann Shelton (photographer)

Ann Shelton (born in Timaru, 1967) is a New Zealand photographer and academic.[1]

Education

Shelton completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1995 and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2002.[2][3]

Career

Shelton began her career as a photojournalist working for daily newspapers, before deciding she wanted more control over her images and deciding to go to art school.[4] As an artist, her work mixes conceptual and narrative traditions of photography.[2] In large-scale, hyper-real photographs she explores histories of people and of places, often bringing forgotten or controversial histories to light. Shelton has also shown a steady interest in the nature of the archive, exploring the collections of others in her work.[2]

Shelton first came to attention with the series Redeye. Selected from thousands of photographs taken over a period of two years, the work document Auckland's art scene and its gallery openings, performances and underground events, especially those taking place around the artist-run space Teststrip.[5] Described by the artist as a 'social diary', the series was described by Auckland Art Gallery photography curator Ron Brownson as 'some of the most inventive and risk taking in recent art in New Zealand,'.[6][7]

Her 2000 series Abigail's Party consists of seven photographs which initially look like documentary shots of modernist homes' living rooms. However each image was staged in Shelton's own home. Discussing the works, Ingrid Neilson wrote:

Shelton hints at the difference between her images and the ‘real thing’, through her use of colour. While documentary photographs of modernist design are usually black and white, Shelton’s works are full, vibrant colour. Through reconstructing modernism, Shelton also has the opportunity to rewrite its history, and she does so with a feminist twist. Her use of luscious, juicy colours, tactile fabric, domestic settings, and titles such as Calendar Girl, Golden Girl or Show Girl, feminise and sexualise these modernist spaces.[8]

One of Shelton's best-known works is the multi-part A library to scale.[9] The artist took as her subject over 3,500 volumes of media clippings and handwritten transcriptions pasted into notebooks and hardback books by amateur historian Frederick B. Butler over a period of 60 years.[10] She discovered the volumes at Puke Ariki museum while undertaking a residency at the nearby Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.[5] Fascinated by Butler's enormous project and the richly visual sight of the shelves and shelves of collaged notebooks stored at the museum, Shelton went on to make several works relating to the archive: large-format photographs that reproduce the shelves; videos which show the pages of individual books being turned; and photographs of individual pages from Butler's own diaries.[10][11] The works have been shown in solo presentations and also as part of group exhibitions examining the nature of the archives, such as Collect/Project at the Adam Art Gallery and Unpacking my library at Te Tuhi.[12][13]

Shelton has frequently employed techniques of doubling, reversing and inverting photographs. She refers to this approach as 'visual stammering', and uses it to draw attention to the subjectivity of photography.[4] Doublet (after Heavenly Creatures), Parker/Hulme crime scene, Port Hills, Christchurch, New Zealand (from 2001) from her Public Spaces series (2001-2003) for example is a dipytch made up of a single image of a curve of a forest path, one moving to the left and one to the right. The seemingly banal image draws its power from the site it documents, the location of the murder of Honorah Parker, later dramatised in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures.[14] In another work, Wintering, after a Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge from 2008, Shelton works from a preparatory sketch by Dutch-born artist Petrus van der Velden held in the collection of the Hocken Library at the University of Otago, choosing the rough drawing over the artist's dramatic oil paintings of the same topic.[15][16]

A recent series, jane says, created for her 2016 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Dark Matter, features plants traditionally associated with treatments for women's fertility placed in ikebana-like arrangements against vibrant coloured backgrounds.[17] The artist spent a year researching, collecting, arranging and photographing the plants, which include thistle, fennel, rhododendron and yarrow. She says:

Ikebana, as I understand it, is the concept that nature is perfect, but there is just a little bit too much of it. It needs distilling and minimising and controlling. I was thinking about what would be an appropriate way to photograph these plants, something that would convey the control they are capable of asserting.[17]

Exhibitions

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Collections

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Publications

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Artist books

Further information

References

  1. ↑ "Shelton, Ann". Find NZ Artists. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 "Ann Shelton". College of Creative Arts, Massey University. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Artists CV" (PDF). Trish Clarke Gallery. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
  4. 1 2 Were, Virginia (Spring 2013). "Contested Narratives". ArtNews: 92–95.
  5. 1 2 Cooper, Jeremy. "Passion and Compassion" (PDF). Enjoy. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  6. 1 2 "Redeye". Christchurch Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  7. ↑ Intra, Giovanni. "drive-by shootings". Ann Shelton. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  8. 1 2 "Abigail's Party". Adam Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  9. ↑ Hurrell, John. "Gavin Hipkins and Ann Shelton". Artbash. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  10. 1 2 Amery, Mark. "How to read a book". Ann Shelton. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  11. ↑ Pound, Francis. "The Reflecting Archive". Ann Shelton. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  12. ↑ "Collect/Project". Adam Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  13. ↑ "Unpacking my library". Te Tuhi. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  14. ↑ "Doublet (after Heavenly Creatures), Parker/Hulme crime scene, Port Hills, Christchurch, New Zealand". Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  15. ↑ "Wintering, after a Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge". Christchurch Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  16. ↑ Poland, Natalie (2008). Once more with feeling. Hocken Library, University of Otago.
  17. 1 2 Knight, Kim (19 November 2016). "Why Ann Shelton's photography is not just pretty pictures". New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 25 November 2016.
  18. ↑ "A kind of sleep". Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  19. ↑ "A library to scale". Enjoy. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  20. ↑ "Room Room". City Gallery Wellington. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  21. ↑ "Once more with feeling". Hocken Library, University of Otago. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  22. ↑ "Solo: Four Wellington Artists". The Dowse Art Museum. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  23. ↑ "The city of gold and lead". Sarjeant Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  24. ↑ "A project about a house". Enjoy. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  25. ↑ "Ann Shelton: Dark Matter". Auckland Art Gallery. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
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