Lisa Crowley, Megan Dunn, Sean Kerr, Maddie Leach, Ella Bella Moonshine Reed, Jono Rotman

The second part of the exchange exhibitions between the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, and the Adam Art Gallery, Parallel Worlds followed on from the Australian exhibition Happiness and featured the work of six New Zealand photo, digital and film-based artists.

Lisa Crowley employs large-scale images and seductive subject matter to dislocate the viewer and complicate the experience of belonging in the world. Megan Dunn is preoccupied by the televisual world and her videos montage joyous Disney moments with iconic rock/pop sound tracks to interrupt the clichéd fairytale with contemporary messages. Sean Kerr abuses the normal presentation and reception of sound and image in his multimedia installations and performances. Maddie Leach’s body of photographs featured deserted pools and professional skaters is indicative of her interest in the connections between public and private operations of these sites and performances. Ella Bella Moonshine Reed employs a range of photomedia in pursuit of her interests in the operation of imagery, painting and representation as it pertains to her life. Jono Rotman exhibited images from his extensive investigation into the architectural spaces, and the associated social and cultural issues, of a burgeoning range of functioning and disused prisons and psychiatric institutions.

In their work, these artists look both outwards to mass media and popular visual information and inward to subjects of personal and idiosyncratic interest. Works that appear alarmingly straightforward and objective, reveal with closer scrutiny, creative investigations into experience, relationships and histories of personal and national importance.