Trish Clark Gallery is pleased to present Chris Corson-Scott’s third solo exhibition, Dreaming in the Anthropocene, a rich suite of Chris Corson-Scott’s new works presented as an Auckland Festival of Photography keynote exhibition under the thematic: Identity.
Chris Corson-Scott’s 2016 extended exploration of New Zealand’s South Island yielded images remarkable for their unsettling juxtapositions of historic industry within the reclaiming natural world, the remnants of industrial behemoths on which the prosperity of New Zealand was formed. Now decayed and largely forgotten, but uncovered by diligent research and multi-day hikes lugging an 8 x 10 camera, the artist calls our attention to the past reality before it disappears entirely, and reminds us of our collective dependence upon and necessary care of the natural world. Corson-Scott’s deep understanding of the behaviour and capture of light remains the equivalent subject to the significance of forgotten historical sites. More pertinent than ever, the series resolutely reflects ‘New Zealand’ while speaking conceptually to a contemporary global discourse.
The quiet melancholy of Winter Morning, Remains of the SS Lawrence, Mokihinui, 2016 is captured as the early sun illuminates the bones of a shipwreck at low tide on a quiet dawn. Evocations of seafaring and trade, the historical basis of New Zealand’s wealth, sit together with the despair and multiplicity of loss engendered by the plethora of shipwrecks on this land’s tempestuous coasts.
The toll of time and nature is married with that of human action in Abandoned Chicory Kiln on the Clutha River, Inch Clutha, 2016. The raw face of industry is juxtaposed with artistic endeavor, and the velocity of nature with that of factory production, in A Poet Writing Before the Falls and Freezing Works, Mataura, 2016. Other images offer naked functionality, the poignancy of nature’s reclamation or of the unnervingly corporeal absence of humans.
Corson-Scott has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally. Exhibitions include The Devil’s Blind Spot (2016- 17) at Christchurch Art Gallery; Kinder’s Presence (2013-14) at Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki; History in the Taking: 40 Years of PhotoForum (2014) at The University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery; Photo 14, Maag Halle, Zurich, Switzerland; My Place (2013) Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Recent Auckland Photography (2013) at North Art; and solo exhibitions at Photospace Gallery, Wellington; the artist-run space Snake Pit, New Photographs (2012); and Photographs (2011) at Wallace Art Centre. With art historian Edward Hanfling he is the co-author of Pictures They Want to Make: Recent Auckland Photography (Photoforum, Auckland: 2013).
Key Collections: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland; Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu; Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
