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.
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