Evanescent Monuments / Chris Corson-Scott

Praise

On first viewing Evanescent Monuments, it is Winter, Powerhouse at the Old Escarpment Mine, Denniston Plateau, that provides the ‘gotcha’ moment – surely nostalgia pure and simple. Then you realise slowly this is not a little bach but the point of power generation for one of the country’s largest mining schemes – and you are being asked to consider that every impact of that mega-extraction project originated here. The little shed, much loved by both architecture and photography in New Zealand, becomes something much more problematic. –Douglas Lloyd Jenkins

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About

This publication features essays by Laurence Simmons, Professor of Film Studies and Media Communication at The University of Auckland, & poet Chris Holdaway, as well as an interview between the artist and Emil McAvoy. Evanescent Monuments was produced to accompany exhibitions of the same name that ran at Parlour Projects (June 9–July 7, 2018), & Trish Clark Gallery (October 5–November 9, 2018). It is a follow-up of sorts to a previous collaboration Dreaming in the Anthropocene (Compound Press, 2017) between Chris Corson-Scott & Chris Holdaway. What we memorialise reflects our values as a society, and typically monuments commemorate the wealthy, powerful, violence, and victimised. These photographs take the fading remnants of early New Zealand industry as inadvertent monuments, and through the wealth and power they represent, reflect on the ideology behind them, and the environmental or economic violence which are their consequences. –Chris Holdaway