Akatarawa - photographs by Dan Anbury

Akatarawa - photographs by Dan Anbury, Photospace Gallery, 17 November 2018 to 26 January 2019.

This is Dan Anbury's first solo exhibition. The photographs were taken on the Akatarawa Road over a period of years, and the project is ongoing. The road winds through the bush-clad hills of the Akatarawa Valley, running from Upper Hutt to Waikanae.

The only other exhibited photograph by Dan Anbury appeared as a finalist in the 2018 Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition at The Academy Galleries, Queens Wharf, Wellington, earlier this year. The photograph 'Mattress', (below) was also taken on the Akatarawa Road.

Gallery hours over Christmas & New Year
The gallery will be closed from 22nd December 2018 to 13th January, 2019 (inclusive) but viewing by appointment will be possible during this period. The gallery will be open during some days in the first half of January, mostly earlier in the day, so keep an eye on the Photospace Gallery Facebook page

Artist statement: Akatarawa

I have been travelling the Akatarawa Road for a long time; in my youth sometimes drunk at two o’clock in the morning, having near death experiences on motorcycles, these days more leisurely dawn trips to find that beautiful light before the direct sun, the flat light with subtle shadows. An overcast day is good, or just after rain; the effect is like spitting on a stone.

It took a while to find the right camera, the right lens, the right film. I have settled on a medium-format panoramic camera and Fuji Velvia 120 roll film. I am very fond of Velvia. It’s a bit Barnum and Bailey; accentuating colour; it  was popular with advertising photographers making commercials.  As much as I admire black and white photography I can’t get past the idea that the world is in colour. There is elegance in black and white, but colour, like the world, is often messy and chaotic. 

It took a while to work out what I was trying to do with this exhibition. This is my best provisional theory:

The Akatarawa Road is a marginal road. It has an arrogance about it as it forces through the landscape, working with it but always to its own ends. The road allows us to move quickly, often not noticing anything beyond its edges. Used as a challenging shortcut or a racetrack, the road services lifestyle blocks, a few small farms, and a saw-mill. A lot of rubbish is dumped, cars are torched, there’s road kill, graffiti, deer, the odd crash, and hunters - people with guns. Akatarawa is not a very important road but secretive and busy in its way, an under-the-radar sort of road, important to me, and the last place huia were seen in the North Island.

I am interested in how our culture defines beauty.  Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror. This is true but it is also the beginning of deception. I feel that rather than only a select group of things being beautiful, everything is beautiful. I am fascinated by the seemingly mundane, by the roadside things mostly ignored. I am not really interested in prelapsarian Romantic landscapes but more in what people do with them.  There is richness in this road for me. It is a microcosm of our society, smaller and slower, easier to digest.

- Dan Anbury, 2018

The terrible, lightest wind in the world
Blows from word to word, from ear
To ear, from name to name, from secret
Name to secret name. You maybe
Did not know you had another
Sound and sign signifying you.

- From The Secret Name, W S Graham.

'Mattress' by Dan Anbury, as it appeared in the 2018 Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition.

Dan Anbury - untitled (white goat)

Dan Anbury - untitled (temporary)

Dan Anbury - untitled (nark)

dan Anbury - untitled (dome)