One Foot Has Not Yet Reached The Next Street: Keith Arnatt

This exhibition is now closed

Through the unique, unfiltered lens of Keith Arnatt, discarded objects from the rubbish tip emerge a new, powerful form. He crosses traditional boundaries between man-made waste and rural splendour, popular and fine art photography.

One Foot Has Not Yet Reached the Next Street is a compilation of eight Keith Arnatt series developed between 1989 and 1992. Inspired by objects in his local environment, the series The Sleep of Reason features rejected concrete animals; Painters Cans and Canned Sunsets were developed from an accumulation of paint tins and an experience at a tip; and Industrial Gloves (Fingers and Thumbs) is derived from the debris of an abandoned paint-spray workshop.

In the 39 large-scale photographs, Arnatt displays unrevealed depths in industrial dross - objects as useless as a discarded and broken toy or as banal as a cement encrusted brick.

Born in Oxford, England in 1930, Keith Arnatt now lives and works in Wales. He made his reputation nationally and internationally in the 1960s as a conceptual artist using the camera to record his activities most famously in the Self Burial series (Tate Gallery) of 1969. Arnatt has continued to build on his reputation with regular contributions to national and international exhibitions.

The exhibition has been brought to New Zealand and toured by Exhibitour New Zealand with the assistance of the British Council.

('One Foot Has Not Yet Reached the Next Street', Bulletin, No.90, June/July 1994, p.4)