Curatorial Statement | Artist's Résumé

Wayne Barrar's photographs reveal a world both familiar and startlingly odd. His subject matter - domestic and commercial interiors - is deceptively ordinary, but looking closer you start to notice strange things. Or perhaps you notice the odd things first, and then are disarmed by the familiar objects. As writer Matthew Coolidge observes, Barrar has a capability to 'recontextualize the familiar, and the experience to effectively explore the margins of the known.' Barrar's photographs resemble scenes from sci-fi movies where humans living on other planets live in housing styled like their Earth equivalents that appears wildly out of place in their new setting. Barrar is fascinated by the human desire to replicate the suburban domestic in alien and unusual surroundings.

It makes Barrar's photographs all the more fascinating when we discover that the locations of his scenes are in fact closer to home. A recent body of colour photographs were taken at the site of an underground development, carved into raw salt, in Kansas, USA. The twelve black and white images which feature in Telecom Prospect 2004 were photographed at different locations including the Coober Pedy Opal Mines and a Nevada nuclear testing site. Barrar's carefully observed photographs document what occurs when humans inhabit the most inhospitable areas of the world and the kind of desperate domesticity that they impose on that alien landscape.

Sarah Farrar

The artist wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the following organisations in the production of the two projects exhibited in Telecom Prospect 2004: Creative New Zealand, Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa; Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) (www.clui.org/), Los Angeles; and the School of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington.