Jennifer Mason: The room at the end of the hall

 05 February 2011 - 06 July 2011

Auckland-based photographer Jennifer Mason creates surreal manipulated imagery often reflecting on the psychological condition of suburban life. In earlier work Mason used carefully cast actors and banal interiors to create sense of suburban neurosis. For the Te Tuhi Billboards Mason has set aside the figure as the subject to explore the potential of domestic architecture to convey a similar sense of unease.

Choosing to document buildings found in 'house for removal' yards, her photographs depict vacant domestic interiors. However, there is more at play in these images than just the dull relics of suburbia. Mason has digitally altered these interiors to contain odd spatial transplants that manipulate the appearance of scale and perspective. Her Photoshop manipulation is not unlike a house of mirrors where disorientated and warped versions of reality both beguile and bemuse.