Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade
Wellington 6140
New Zealand

Patrick Pound

Documentary Intersect

29 July 18 September 2016

I started by collecting things in order to inform my work. What seems to have happened slowly is that the collections eventually became my work.
– Patrick Pound

The New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound has had a long-term engagement with the work of Walker Evans, both as a writer and as a practising artist. For his solo exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, Pound developed an installation comprised of found images, taking his cue from Walker Evans’s practice of working with readymade printed matter which he published in magazines such as Fortune and Architectural Forum.

While Pound’s collecting habits are voracious, he is also a great organiser. He is interested in typologies and arranges items according to shared content: ‘tears’, ‘floral clocks’, ‘crime scenes’, ‘sleepers’, and so on. Laying these out in linear sequences Pound discovers points of intersection to create complex grids of structured yet chaotic imagery. A Hollywood film still of a crime scene will sit eerily alongside an image of a real deceased subject sourced from an archive; or a set of postcards will show the same subject, shot by different photographers and describing both changing viewpoints and the passage of time. Pound has stated: ‘People make sense of the world through assembling, listing and categorising…meaning is to be found in the accumulation of [these] details.'

Documentary Intersect was supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans, Sonya Lacey: Newspaper for Vignelli, and Walker Evans: The Magazine Work.