CURATED BY SANDY CALLISTER FOR ADAM ART GALLERY TE PATAKA TOI, WELLINGTON

The exhibition borrows its title from a book published in 1976 that surveyed the emerging contemporary art medium of photography and took a gendered approach to its subject through the work of 31 New Zealand women artists. The exhibition examines a particular form of image making that opens up thinking about the intersection of feminism, new technologies, and a disruptive epoch.

All selected artists demonstrate their embrace of and struggle with established conventions and hierarchies in the art, film and photographic worlds. Employing strategies such as staging, repetition, reconstruction, assemblage and blurring, they test new technologies, slipping between categories to reframe everyday experiences with disruptive purpose, yet avoiding overt politics. Experimenting with the new media of their time, these artists foreshadow how technologies now mediate our desires and inner thoughts; they are eloquent harbingers of our Instagram era.