Rooms found only in the home was the first exhibition to survey the photographic and video work of Marie Shannon, an artist who has been exhibiting since the mid 1980s. Drawing extensively on holdings of Shannon’s works in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection and the artist’s personal archive, the exhibition explored the intersecting spheres of Shannon’s personal and professional life. Ranging from the early 1980s to the present day, the exhibition provided an opportunity to review her evolving practice and its common and recurring themes and threads.

Shannon graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1983, at a time when the conventions of photography as a fine art practice were being tested and challenged. Though exposed to the logic of documentary photography and modernist notions such as ‘the decisive moment’, she resisted such approaches. Instead she tested the transparency of the image and its claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, by collaging photographs together in ways that registered slippages and changes in perspective, and by constructing then photographing hand-made models of domestic and studio environments that were clearly makeshift and imaginary. Though closely tied to her own life, this approach rendered the documentation of everyday experience as somehow second-hand; by re-making her world she set the stage for a new self-consciousness about the nature of photography as a creative practice.

Many of Shannon’s works hinge on relationships – her family life, her relationship with her partner the late Julian Dashper, and with other artists with whom she has come in contact. She processes these by making simple observations about art-making and the thought-experiments and conversations that inflect her life and interactions as an artist and a home-maker. Over time, the concept of distance has come to play a more acute role in Shannon’s work, with the effects of separation and the passage of time becoming prevalent concerns. Her video works and recent photography introduce an archival tendency – a process of cataloguing the contents, absences, and memories that shape her daily present.

Marie Shannon (b. 1960) has been included in several major exhibitions including: Imposing narratives: beyond the documentary in recent New Zealand photography, Wellington (1989); Headlands: thinking through New Zealand art, Sydney & Wellington (1992); the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (1996); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (1998); the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1998), AC Projects, New York (2000). In 2001, she accompanied Julian Dashper to Marfa, Texas where she spent time as a guest of the Chinati Foundation. Since 2009, after Dashper’s untimely death, she has been sorting his studio and archives and is involved in organising an ongoing series of exhibitions from his Estate for Michael Lett in Auckland. Marie Shannon is represented by Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland, and Hamish McKay, Wellington.

Adam Art Gallery thanks Cam McCracken, Lucy Hammonds and Lauren Gutsell, all of Dunedin Public Art Gallery, for their assistance in the realisation of this exhibition.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Elizabeth Price: A RESTORATION.