Fables for a modern era

By HANNA SCOTT

Artist Ava Seymour is celebrating a decade of producing photo-collage by putting her original collection of work on show in Auckland for the first time. Marking 10 years since her Blood and Guts in Deutschland series was shown at dada-style gallery EndArt during Berlin's post-Cold War era, the Michael Lett Gallery is exhibiting the works, this time reprinted on a much bigger scale with more impact.

"It feels great to be exhibiting these early works again," Seymour remarks. "The work originated in 1993 when I was living in East Berlin. I stumbled across a newspaper factory in Mitte, Sontag. It had been abandoned, of course, and there were photographs strewn all over the floor. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 so it had been derelict for two or three years perhaps. And I just collected a whole lot of these photographs.

"It was totally spontaneous. The found photographs were really interesting from a historical point of view, and really conducive to working over. There were hundreds of photos, and I discarded a lot. I had a German anatomical textbook, a medical book, which I found somewhere and I used that for the fleshy bits."

The images are largely street scenes, press shots of a Berlin still brandishing its wartime scars, littered with a cast of misfit cut-and-paste characters. "This work really documents a time that it lost."

Admitting the works are dark, Seymour says, "When you look at the darker work, or the more grisly work, you know an artist in New Zealand would not produce this work. For a start the photographs are very war. Even at that point in my life I had worked with some pretty grim scenes in the east. There were something like 30,000 squats in the east at that time. It's quite a nasty body of work, but it's also got a sense of humour."

Seymour starts to describe Who Done It?, a black and white collage with graphic touches of red intestines. A line-up of males is assembled in front of a building, with a female corpse lying at their feet. Not for the fainthearted, Seymour's medical textbook imagery rises to the challenge, exposing the murdered woman's gory death. The image is at once a photographic document set in Berlin but also a narrative played out through time. The photograph is evidence and jury all at once.

"There's a really bent humour in these works," Seymour says. "If you take the work very seriously, you're missing the point. It's more absurd, surreal even. For instance, I had just been reading Kenneth Anger's trashy tabloid book Hollywood Babylon before making Who Done It?. He writes about the infamous murder of wannabe actress The Black Dahlia in Hollywood. She had been cut in half and her body drained, so that scene is acted out in this work.

"Each series of work is quite autobiographical. This is why I don't elaborate too much on where the works come from. They're very much a product of a time and place in my life."

Moreover, Seymour wants the work to be seen in the context of Germany at that time and what those people had seen, as well as part of the European history of apocalyptic art.

"I am really interested in the bizarre, the macabre and the lascivious nature of mankind. My dealer in Wellington calls me a moralist, actually. I am a very moral person. I'm cautious about what I use and how I use it - what's acceptable and what's repulsive."

The works are disconcerting because they are photographs, clearly real scenes and real people. The photo-collage aspect shifts the images into different territory; they become more like stage sets, littered with casual but deliberate props.

That's where the horror turns into humour.

If the images were taken literally or truthfully, they would be difficult to stomach, but they are fabricated images, fantasy fables for a modern era.

Like 15th-century moral painter Heironymous Bosch, Seymour is working in a challenging way to expose the tastes and conventions of contemporary society, skating on the thin ice of acceptability.

"I have to acknowledge my work is quite political. I am a really politically conscious person.

Visual arts

* What: Blood and Guts in Deutschland by Ava Seymour

* Where & when: Michael Lett, 478 Karangahape Rd, August 26-September 13