Build Your Altar To This Moment

Sheilah Wilson at Enjoy Gallery Wellington

Frances and I attended our friend Sheilah Wilson’s opening at Enjoy Gallery, Cuba St, last Wednesday 12 June 2013.  Enjoy is Wellington’s experimental exhibition space.

Sheilah Wilson opening - Frances centre, Sheilah next right

Sheilah Wilson opening – Frances centre, Sheilah next right

The gallery was a photographic studio in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sheilah explored this history through the work of the exhibition.  She became aware of a collection of glass plate negatives that were found in the attic during renovations in the late 90’s. These are now in the Te Papa collection.  They are images of New Zealand soldiers in uniform sometimes with their families before the soldiers departed for WW1.  The photographs were taken against various backdrops in the studio space that is now Enjoy.  The people are now absent from the images shown.

Sheilah Wilson - Build Your Altar To This Moment

Sheilah Wilson – Build Your Altar To This Moment

Sheilah has draped cyanotype images of light patterns from within the gallery over the top of the strange (and to us exotic) backdrops. These provide a living reference to the light that sustains both the historical and the current use of the space as an altar to the creation of narrative. The light as an altar was further emphasized through a video that showed a hand (Sheilah’s) stroking and caressing the light and shadow blossoming and fading on the wall of the studio.

The exhibition made a fundamental statement about light as the forum for the projection of (the illusion of) our lives.  The historical material itself stimulated another imaginative speculation about the artifice of the backdrops and the intent of both the absent subjects and the photographers who arranged them.  The sum of it all was a powerful shift in mood from the mundane of the street to an eerie awareness of changing time, space and human occupation.

Great show, Sheilah.