Anne Noble
Of Landscape and Longing

Two Rooms presents an exhibition by Anne Noble, one of New Zealand’s most respected photographers. This exhibition will continue Noble’s research into Antarctica that started in 2001 and explore her concern with the cultural construction of place through imagination and depiction.

Noble often works in series enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities in great depth. Through moving away from the traditional photographer’s role as companion to exploratory and surveying teams, and questioning the tendency to frame the Antarctic landscape as heroic, picturesque or sublime, Noble is searching for appropriate forms of representation in light of our current, rather than historical, relationship to place.

The Antarctic project is part of Noble’s ongoing interests in the cultural origins of the visual imaginary and in how this contributes to a ‘sense of place’. Her first Antarctic series included images taken in whiteout conditions where human perception and cognition, severely compromise our ability to ‘sense a place’

During 2003 Noble undertook a study of the Antarctic imaginary, photographing representations of Antarctica in Museums and discovery centres in Japan, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland and America. In March 2005 she returned to Antarctica to photograph tourist sites and the Antarctic tourism experience. The resulting work has contributed to a series of exhibition and installation projects in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States and Two Rooms will be the first to exhibit this series in Auckland.

In 2001 The Dunedin Public Art Gallery curated a major retrospective of Noble’s work. The resulting exhibition States of Grace, toured New Zealand 2001 – 2003. In 2005 and 2006 her work has featured in exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, in Berlin and the Patio Herreriano in Spain. In November 2007 her series Ruby’s Room was exhibited at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and toured Europe in 2008.

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