WONDERLAND
2006
ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne
31 January – 25 February 2006
SELECTED WORKS: Welcome to Wonderland, Foto Freo, The Western Australian Maritime Museum
25 March – April 25 2006
The world has an uncanny theatricality for Anne Zahalka. Looking at her photographs, you can’t explain why or how the environment is so staged-looking. The whole of nature is a cultivated spectacle for sightseers, vulgar and beautiful at the same time, which yields a peculiar remote-ness.
works
overview
Wonderland continues explorations into both real and artificial landscapes through a series of hyper-real photographic images.
Nature is simulated and manipulated via the agencies of tourism and by the photographer’s sleight of hand to seem factual, fabricated or fantastical. While the camera bears witness to these landscapes and to its visitors, all is not as it appears. Creatures from one place become dislocated or displaced in another, while some thrive in their constructed habitats and new surroundings. As viewers become surveyors of these scenes, the very nature of such landscapes and their meaning is called into question.