Marie Shannon

A REAR WINDOW SCREENING

Marie Shannon’s photography and video works often look to her family life and domestic environment, daily observations, and the process of artmaking as subject matter. Graduating from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1983, Shannon studied photography at a time when an emphasis was placed on the documentary or journalistic power of the image. Despite being drawn to the medium, she resisted this ‘decisive moment’ approach, and instead focused on creating carefully constructed images drawing on her own life and home environment. Framing these subjects as ones of common experience, her work gently unravels the multiple readings that exist across different understandings of home and domesticity.

Many of Shannon’s works hinge on relationships – the people, objects and evidence of personal interactions enacted through the course of everyday life. Through this enquiry a sense of past and present becomes important, with the concepts of distance, time and memory playing more acute roles in her work. Many of her video works, including The Rooms in the House (2016), The Aachen Faxes (2012) and What I Am Looking At (2011) introduce more of an archival tendency – a process of cataloguing the contents, absences, and memories that shape her present day. The Rooms in the House records Shannon’s now-adult son describing, in a rational and unsentimental way, his memories of the contents of his childhood home.