Burnt Bridge
Text by Catherine Rhodes
Although new to the Gallery, this is very much a homecoming for Will Bennett. Having grown up in Toko, ensconced in the same hills that nurtured Toss Woollaston, he returns from his Wellington base with a recent body of work that had its genesis in this region.
The paintings reference photos Will took between Christmas 2017 and March 2018. A seemingly disparate collection of ‘moments’ resonated only in hindsight, when their relevance was laid bare by the passing of time. With a nod to vernacular photography and the New Zealand Gothic, he re-imagines and re-creates these images, in a process of translation from print to paint. This act upends any lingering assumptions that photography can, or indeed should, represent truth, and lays to rest the dichotomy of documentation vs. interpretation. Nothing is as it seems, and nor should it be.
The exhibition is titled Burnt Bridge; after one of the paintings in this series and referencing a technical malfunction - burn-mark or light leak - that besets photographic practice. He takes this ‘flaw’ from a medium that is now increasingly flawless and replicates it in pigment, once again confounding assumptions about the veracity of what we see.
We are also left to ponder the interactions between the figures depicted. What appear to be family groups in a domestic setting or an individual ‘conquering’ a landscape are lent an air of disquiet, or unease, of uncertainty. The ‘burnt bridge’ may in fact refer to the people portrayed and the fracture of relationships within.
The viewer is witness to a moment, but also to an energy barely concealed. Although small in stature, these evocative, richly toned works suggest an everyday, and a memory so familiar and personal we can’t touch it - precisely because it’s less individual and more collective than we might dare to believe.