By Shelley Topp
Photocopy artist Anjie Connon’s solo exhibition I Do opened at the Chamber Gallery in the Rangiora Library last week. It is the Papanui High School art teacher’s first solo exhibition in 19 years.
She searched within her community to find the dresses she used to create the works in her exhibition.
She has resurrected them from their burial boxes of tissues and camphor chests to relive their glory days in a new form.
The fragmented, life-size assemblages are made from repetitively photocopying each wedding dress and reconstructing the original as photocopied compositions, with the short focal length of the scanner head plunging the creases and folds of the fabric into evocative drifts.
I Do examines Anjie’s reverence for precious, yet hidden, heirlooms and is influenced by British artist David Hockney, now in his 80s, whose large acrylic-on-canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for US$90.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York in 2018.
The Waimakariri Community Arts Council’s I Do exhibition, which runs until August 12, features 16 life-size art works. One is not for sale but a selection of smaller A3-sized works that weren’t able to be displayed are also available to buy.
