Dream House
The idea of the house as a home is at the very centre of Marie Shannon’s retrospective Rooms found only in the home, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery: all paths lead to ‘home’ as to a treasure chest waiting to be unpacked. The photographic and video works in her exhibition, methodically pared down from her back catalogue, form a complete narrative—a familial one and an elegiac one, tracing out how her life and her career as an artist intertwine, like climbing plants round a house. Always stubborn in pursuit of a particular manner of presentation, her preoccupation with the preservation of memories—moving between enchantment and disenchantment, between japes and meditative reflection—here, rather finely and profoundly, achieves a kind of apotheosis as her thematic progressions complete a narrational cycle.
The first work in the show, (1982), is a photographic diptych made when Marie Shannon was still an art student at Elam. In one of these images we see a shadow of a corner of her childhood home. Architecturally designed and modernist, it stood out in her suburban Auckland
