Shrinking Violet

Cao Xun, Jess Robins, Motoko Kikkawa

Play_Station

7 October – 23 October 2020

Reviewed by Deidra Sullivan for PhotoForum, November 2020

Shrinking Violet, at Play_station from 7 October to 23 October, featured the work of three emerging photographers: Cao Xun, Jess Robins and Motoko Kikkawa. As the title suggests, the exhibition sought to explore the potential photography has to be a private, reflective process, an engagement with an interior state. The exhibition flyer describes the show’s intention to “...think about photography as an introverted act – counter to its more common, hyper-social contexts. Each practice unfurls the potential of the medium’s inherently reserved and elusive nature.”

This is a worthwhile ambition – as the photography we now experience (both in our production and consumption) seems to be a steroid enhanced version of its former self. It’s hard to contemplate the subtleties of photography when we can easily create hundreds of photographs on our devices each day, or when we absentmindedly scroll through endless online content. Even in galleries, the average time spent in front of an artwork is something like 20 seconds. We have forgotten what the relationship between photography and introspection might be.

The question for Shrinking Violet then, is whether the show fulfills its intentions - to explore ‘photography as an introverted act’, and to consider photography’s ‘inherently reserved and elusive nature.’ I’d suggest that while Cao Xun and Jess Robin’s work both engage with the personal and the intimate, their work is not easily categorised as ‘introverted’ – rather, both artists engage with ideas which are created and exacerbated by the social and digital contexts of online media culture.

Xun’s work for example: his layered photographs are ambiguous. Bodies are wrapped in organic, cocoon like structures (where do they begin and end?) or modified with prosthetics. Other elements disrupting a clear reading are added in post-production. Moya Lawson, who wrote the exhibition’s essay, suggests Xun’s works are “...captivating without being necessarily open or inviting” and I agree. Xun himself has stated that he is interested in “...the exploration of ideas around emotional discomfort and awkwardness.” His constructed images remind me of the visceral discomfort experienced looking at Cindy Sherman’s mannequins, or Jeanne Dunning’s The Blob (1999). This discomfort is a social one – the work plays on the complex and difficult relationships we have with our bodies in a social and digital context. The ‘emotional discomfort and awkwardness’ Xun refers to seems like shame, self-consciousness, embarrassment – all of these experiences need a social context in which to manifest, and our digital online culture provides a multitude of them.

Jess Robin’s work combines stock imagery, found imagery and photographs shot on her phone in a series of cut and paste photographic collages. She layers sunsets, moon and cloud-scapes, landscapes, low resolution ambiguous interiors and silhouettes, and writes over them with marker pen, as well as sticking down layers of plastic and pieces of lace. The overall aesthetic does suggest, as Moya Lawson writes, the “sanctuary of a teenage bedroom”, but it also references the instantaneous, relentless imagery that fleetingly appears on tumblr or Instagram in its quality, ambiguity and layering. It is an uncomfortable combination of public and private. There’s a sense that with social media culture, personal space is no longer private, and Robin’s work, I think, references this. Perhaps it is introspective? But it is also performative.

Motoko Kikkawa’s work most clearly speaks to audiences about the self-reflective or introspective nature of photography. The unlikely combination of photographs of colourful algae alongside photographs of droplets of water on bathroom faucets evoke a sense of careful and meditative attention to detail. In this regard Kikkawa’s work could be considered more formally or traditionally ‘photographic’ in its concern with ‘seeing.’ Unlike the work of Robins and Xun, it also seems to draw less specifically on digital media contexts to create meaning.

Moya Lawson asks whether we can imagine a form of photography which is still “social by definition” but also “introverted by nature”. It’s a good question. All photographs contain some element of introversion or self-reflection; sometimes it’s buried in the photographer’s choice of subject, their thematic preferences, or the moment the shutter is pressed; what Lawson refers to as the photographer’s “impulses and attractions.” Yet this does not render all photography introverted or evocative of an interior state. Photographs also function as a highly developed social and cultural language – which much of the work in this exhibition actively engages with. All three artists in this show are exploring interesting ideas – but I am less convinced by the premise that brought them together.

Deidra Sullivan is currently Curator, Photographic Archive, at the Alexander Turnbull Library. She previously taught photography on the Bachelor of Creativity programme at Te Auaha, WelTec and Whitireia’s joint School of Creativity, Wellington.