Light Sensitive & Anna Perry: Fog

The Blue Oyster is pleased to present Light Sensitive: Alternative Photographic Technologies and Anna Perry: Fog. The exhibitions will open on Tuesday 18 May at 5:30pm and run until 12 June.

These exhibitions converge with a focus on alternative chemical and analogue technologies for the synthetic construction of sensations, whether in the replication of an image or scent. They share too an interest in our proclivity for creating and clinging to those things that hold an ability to trigger our memories.

Light Sensitive: Alternative Photographic Technologies brings together the work of New Zealand photographers Alan Bekhuis, Joyce Campbell, Ben Cauchi and Darren Glass. Working in a range of techniques to produce ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and home-made pinhole camera images, these photographers are part of a growing international revival of interest in often complex and obsolete photographic technologies from the 19th century. Curator Chanelle Carrick explains that their approaches reflect reactions to the current dominance of digital imaging processes, exploring themes of the photograph as a technologically produced image or as a tactile image-object associated with commemoration and memory, and traditional links between the medium and concepts of visual truth and evidence.

For Fog Anna Perry has created a sensory environment with devices that emit smells, which can provoke individual recollections of place, time or event. Central to the exhibition is a sculptural apparatus that creates the all too familiar smell of rain-on-hot-concrete continuously inside the gallery. Perry singles out the olfactory senses because of their close association with the memory centres of the brain. With time our memories become foggy and abstract; as such the exhibition expands to include a collage of found images and material illustrating our desire to collect and cling to things, like fragrances, that contain triggers for us as aide-mémoires.

Fog is proudly supported by Serviceman, Placemakers Dunedin and Artzone.