Looking for the lost sights of New York and the wild

By FRANCES GRANT

The dramatic collapse of New York's iconic Twin Towers has suddenly changed the city's famous Manhattan skyline. And the September terrorist attacks have burned images of America's wounded city into the minds of people all round the globe.

But Auckland photographer Lisa Crowley, who is heading to the Big Apple to take up a four-month residency in which she will develop work focusing on the city's public spaces, says her plans have not been changed by the terrifying events that happened there.

"Part of my project resides in the notion of what it's like when I get there," she says. "And I lived in Cairo when all the terrorist bombs were going off there."

Crowley, 32, is one of three visual artists who have been offered the chance to live and work overseas as part of Creative New Zealand's international residencies programme.

The others are Taranaki-born Michael Stevenson, who will spend a year in Berlin, and Auckland artist Stella Brennan who heads to Sydney for three months.

In New York, Crowley wants to document various public spaces in the city and also the wilderness of some of America's national parks.

"I'll be looking at the city's social spaces such as market places, zoos, parks, how people interact in them, their movements, and ideas of leisure.

"I'm also interested in going out to national parks and looking at how we represent nature and the difference between the two modes of thinking."

Her project is named Rushes, the term for unedited film footage. "I'm interested in how we edit our thinking around social spaces, in looking at rushes of information and the processes of recording images."

This doesn't mean that Crowley will necessarily be spurning the places which are the usual fodder of tourists' snaps and postcards. But she intends to look at them in a different way, with an eye for the banal and the readily discarded.

Her solo show, Freefall, was exhibited at New Plymouth's Govett Brewster Art Gallery last year, and included in Auckland's first triennial, Bright Paradise, early this year. Her latest work, The Passenger, has been shown in Wellington, Nelson and Melbourne's Centre for Contemporary Photography. It is a series of photographs which juxtapose images from tourist locations - sulphur craters at Rotorua, for example - and landscape-like, close-up shots of crystals. The effect is one of emptiness and dread. Crowley describes the sequence as "cinematic and cautionary".

Crowley will take up her residency in January, working at the International Studio and Curatorial programme. She will not have an exhibition but the programme includes studio visits from curators and critics.

"It's great, it's a real chance to throw myself into my work," says the Elam school of fine arts lecturer.

"And to negotiate my working processes with another place, a different set of circumstances and parameters."

The residency is also "a fantastic opportunity to meet other artists and having access to all the galleries".

Murray Shaw, Creative New Zealand's arts board chair, says the international residencies programme "provides significant benefits to New Zealand artists. They expand opportunities for New Zealand artists to work in a new, critical context and present their work to an international audience."