Ann Shelton

We feature a recent 2004 acquisition. 

Ann Shelton
Villa #8, Formerly Lake Alice Hospital
Wanganui, New Zealand
2004
c type print, diptych, 900 x 720mmea.

Some notes:

Ann Shelton’s recent body of work, a series of mirror image photographic diptychs shown recently at Starkwhite, Auckland, is based on her visits to the former Lake Alice Hospital in Wanganui, New Zealand.

From the outset, it is obvious this place bears no relation to the Wonderland that the fictional Alice might happily have found herself in. Instead, a sense of dread and institutional conformity prevails.

The photographs of the former and now decaying psychiatric institution focus on the residential buildings or villas as they are optimistically titled. The first noticeable aspect of these images is of course the lack of people. Yet the whole environment, the overgrown pathways, the empty fire escapes, the windows and forgotten front doors all seem to whisper with the ghosts of the past residents. It is as if the human story and the development of psychological practices that would have taken place at Lake Alice are ingrained in these buildings.

There is even a glimpse through a window of a round mirror once used in diagnostic practices derived from phrenology; facilitating examination of the bumps of the skull to determine understandings of patient behaviours!! 

As a theoretical frame of reference, the cloak of psychoanalysis and Lacan’s mirror phase theory seem relevant here as Lacan debated and analysed the development of the self, I, and its subsequent stability through recognition of mirror imaging. While it is true the reflecting image here provides a sense of perceived visual stability that we can take pleasure from – much as we would with the reflections, in a calm lake, of surrounding trees and shadows, we cannot deny the underlying references within the dual images of schizophrenia, of a sense of nothingness and abandonment.

Shelton's work practice has regularly used the image reversal so intrinsic to the photographic process   revealing the kind of uncertainty we can experience  in remembering, via the photographic image, the original orientation of the object to our view.

Here one might “reflect”on the process of reflection  as a function of the perceiving mind and experience anew our necessary engagement with illusions of the real.

And in the process we can consider whether these images have been manipulated in their making. How true to the “real” should we believe that they really are?

Taken in the starkness of a grey and miserable mid-winter morning, it is not surprising that we are confounded by these images – are they prison huts, communal buildings or dormitories? In their architectural design, planned sameness and a desire for restricted normality prevailed but ultimately failed. We do not live in the real world alone, there is always an accompanying reflection – one that is a constructed model for our individualism, our unique mental processes, internal states and psychological pathways.

Ann Shelton, Installation view, Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2004