Master’s Exhibition
This exhibition explores themes of “Power and Control” using filmic and photographic methods in the discipline of Constructive photography.
For this work, Jason photographed a selection of existing and lost Colonial Civic Buildings in Nelson, all chosen as architectural spaces of implicit and hidden power. He then built scale models of the structures and photographed the models in various constructed compositions both as stills and in the film.
Power is considered in the context that governance is in the hands of corporations and not elected councils or governments. The Work questions if democracy is an illusion; an ideology rather than a reality. It explores hidden meanings within this architecture; the inherent metaphysical connotations imbued not only in the architecture, but also in the model and the image.
The exhibition investigates the merging of boundaries between what is real and unreal, creating an illusionary space that aims to establish the uncanny through the transformation of the familiar to the unfamiliar.
This exploration acknowledges the paradoxical nature of the project; that while investigating and critiquing manipulation, it is at the same time attempting to draw the viewer into a manipulated experience.
Selected prints
