Fantastic Voyage: The Photographs of Arthur Tress

This major touring exhibition of the works of the veteran American photographer Arthur Tress comes to Christchurch on its world tour through India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Mongolia and Australia. After leaving New Zealand it will continue on to Canada. It was developed and funded by the Arts America Program of the U.S. Information Agency as a tribute to over 36 years work by one of America's most prodigious and diversified photographers. Richard Lorenz, an independent curator from Berkeley, California selected the 100 images for this major retrospective of Tress's career. Dating from 1956 to 1992, they provide a fantastic voyage through the major concepts, concerns and individual preoccupations of this artist.

Works from each series chart his path from real life images of primitive African societies to the recent manipulated images of futuristic time travel. What appears to be documentary reportage can be so subjective or so fabricated that it subverts the genre and generates a visual world in which the incongruous dualities of beauty and violence are seen to coalesce.

Gradually Tress' work changed from the anecdotal to the universal as he 'strove for theatrical metaphors for the dark mysteries of life.' Using still-life assemblages he tackled issues thrown up by the intimations of destiny. He examined Western economic and scientific culture and its struggles to enter the next millennium without destroying itself, and the inner space of mind and body as related to the quantum energies of distant galaxies. Fantastic Voyage also takes us through Tress's narrative serial images which are often based on the creation myths, into eroticism, the nature of the artist, ecology and the universal search for enlightenment.

Arthur Tress was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He began photography as a youth and after graduating from college in 1962 travelled widely photographing cultures and customs in Egypt, Mexico, India and Europe. Tress returned to the United States in 1968 and during that year had his first solo exhibition in New York. He has published ten books of his photographs. The most recent was the 1990 Requiem for a Paper Weight which is the final part in his trilogy on one man's journey towards enlightenment, told in a fascinating neo-surrealistic spectrum of stunning photographic images.

This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in the Botanic Gardens.