HARRY CULY

‘After spending much of my late teens and twenties living overseas, I came back to this place which represented home for me. On my return, I encountered an eerie feeling: ‘home’ felt strangely unfamiliar. This prompted a desire to explore this uncanny sense of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging, through photographing the next generation of young people living here, and the landscape they inhabit, as a way to picture what home might mean to me now.’ — Harry Culy

Made between 2018-2022, the photographs in this exhibition wander through a nondescript urban landscape, recording scenes that oscillate between the mysterious and mundane. Enigmatic graffiti, tangled vines and wires, shop window displays, a spiderweb built on the wing mirror of a car, these scenes are punctuated with images of the young people who inhabit the city. The photographs in this exhibition form a dreamlike narrative that rejects any sort of definitive conclusion. It instead looks for patterns and rhythms that may echo the fragility of belonging, and the uncertain future facing us.

Harry Culy lives and works in Wellington and completed his Master of Fine Arts at Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University Wellington, in early 2020. Culy has exhibited widely across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia and was the recipient of the 2018 Peter Turner Scholarship in Photography, and in 2021 he was awarded an Arts Foundation Laureate, receiving the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award.

Harry runs a small press photo book company called Bad News Books.