Construction blurs

Red Girl

Princes Street

Orange Digger

Train Station

Construction blurs

Red Crane

Fence Boy

High street demolition

Queens Gardens

Yellow Digger

These images make up the secondary set within the Constructions exhibition. It's all about scale or something. Read the blurb:

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

What’s in it for me?

People keep asking me what I think of the stadium and my response is always ambivalent. Maybe I’m protecting my future commercial opportunities or maybe I think I shouldn’t criticise financial responsibility as shonky as my own. Either way this exhibition isn’t about the controversy.

I have taken on the task of recording the changes to the Awatea Street area as it changes during the stadium construction. This is part of a greater project of photographically documenting Dunedin’s industrial heritage.

The work put into demolition and construction make a great subject; brightly coloured machinery, busy working men, constantly changing structures and it is all done half hidden behind the white fence. To get these views over the fence I use a portable trampoline and take the shot at the top of the bounce … or maybe I use another method.

The distortion is a technique I have used before in other contexts and I find that it is useful to compress the visual information of a much wider panorama image into a bite sized chunk that is easy to digest and saves precious paper. The human brain is a wonderful thing; use yours to uncompress the images to their full width.

Big and small, wide and tall, nothing is fixed. Scale is illusory. If it’s about a game then we should enjoy having a play. That’s what’s in it for me.

Chris Reid

This exhibition is part of the course work for the Otago Polytechnic School of Art. Thanks to the Design department, University of Otago for the use of this venue.

more Constructions

Awatea St

Rail Crossing

Pile Driving

Constructions

Rail Bridge

Allied Tower

Butts Rd

Minerva St sunset

Minerva St high tide

These are pictures from my current exhibition (until Oct 29) being held at Leithbank Centre for Design corner of Forth St and Leithbank Near the University. Just next to the bridge. The prints are about 900 mm X 600 mm and are priced at $350 unframed in editions of 5.

Yu-Hsien finds his celphone

Yu-Hsien and his house

This is Yu-Hsien, my neighbour.

He has a look of genuine delight and relief on his face because he just found his celphone that he dropped while walking yesterday on the hill top behind our houses. He found it again after we walked the same route with me repeatedly calling his number.

cars in the wild

Lure

I'm usually a bit retentive about how I stitch images together so this is a bit of a crack at some rough stitching.

I have been collecting images for a series I call Cars In The Wild. Once New zealand was famous for the motoring relics still in daily use but for the last 15 years or so the cheap imports from Japan have made it no longer necessary to look after old cars and keep them on the road. The ones that are left are usually well prized by their owners and sometimes just old dungers that haven't died yet. This Beemer is definitely in the prized catagory.

Beach crane

One more crane for luck. This one spotted loitering around the St Kilda beach area during the contruction of the sewerage outfall extension in 2008. Image stitched out of three.

Pile driving

Pile driving crane

This crane is working on the Dunedin Stadium site. Inside the yellow housing is a pneumatic hammer which drives the concrete piles into the ground.

A crane stands perfectly still by the waters edge.

Container crane, Port Chalmers

One of the fortunate things about living where I do is the always changing and often spectacular scenery; landscape, harbourscape, Portscape. I go past this viewpoint looking towards the Port all the time and very often stop to shoot it. This time I thought the crane was nicely back lit with a light fog and worth the effort to collect my tripod from home and come back.

I shoot cranes in the wild quite often. The exhibition I am working on currently incorporates frequent images of cranes and I have given it the provisional title of 'Erector Set'.