Guest Appearances is an exhibition by Karen Crisp and Karena Way, being held at Laundromat Art Project Spaces from 27th November – 15th December.

Karen Crisp completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2008, having maintained a decade-long interest in the idea of ‘landscape’ as an historical, conceptual, cultural and physical construct. She utilises photography to consider the residues of history contained in landscapes, and to portray sites as primarily marked by absence. Her images provide a scene for the examination of the landscape, and offer an interrogation of the mediated relationships that form through the physical, historical, personal and associative meanings they conjure in the viewer.

Key themes include landscape as a history of ecological disruption, and the portrayal of the loss of biological complexity and of habitats. The landscapes portrayed will be familiar and may appear banal to many New Zealanders, but these are sites that have been destroyed by clearance, settlement and intensive agricultural practices.

Karena uses image, objects and sound to illuminate some of the contradictions of post-colonial ‘culture’. In particular she explores the operation of a national a-historical post-colonial zeitgeist in a colonial nation state, the tensions between a non-indigenous artist attempting to work in the space between indigenous and guest without spelling out what it means to be indigenous – and the challenge of inviting engagement with these tensions in the contemporary world.

Her work is about seeing and not seeing, about floating above and beyond history and our place in it. If seeing is believing, then in these works (in the words of Andrea Geyer) we also have to ‘believe to see’. The claim of caretaker/guardian comes from the knowledge passed down through the arterial heartland of this home-land and its people. ‘They’ still read the painful signposts invisible to ‘us’, still see the markings, scarrings, tracings of history as blinding fluorescent highlights crisscrossing the land at every cliff face, ridge, drained swamp and denuded forest, glistering red dye coursing and screaming its way through the polluted streams, great sacred rivers and waterways.

Karena underscores her process and making with the question: ‘how can we learn to see, or indeed enter the conversation, with a sanitised memory of nation-making as the dominant image of our world?’

27th November – 15th December
Opening night Friday 27th 6pm - 9pm, all invited

The Laundromat Art Project Space
92 Second Avenue,
Tauranga