Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha: We can travel only a short way together
I came across a group exhibition called "A Moment of Quiet" when I went to visit James Gilberd, curator at Photospace Gallery in Wellington last week. I was looking through the works and was stopped in my tracks by a work in Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha's collection "We can travel only a short way together". The large colour photograph is simply called 'Untitled 2' and is a shot of distant clouds above a gentle ocean taken from a grassy lookout. The whole image appears lit from within with a gentle, glowing vibrance - the sort of evening light sometimes described as the 'golden hour'. The softness of the ocean surf blends up into the luminous sky, looking like another world compared to the tussocky grass in the foreground, the quality of the light bringing to mind a Turner seascape, of even the appearance of god in a Baroque ceiling painting. The image somehow manages to be peaceful and disquieting at the same time, which doesn't seem like it should be possible.
Each of the other images in the series is of an empty environment in both urban and country settings; 3 are bridges and one an old tree. All the photos have the same inexplicably haunted atmosphere sitting on the edge of serenity and disquiet.
Reading the artist's statement and talking with James, I came to understand that this body of work relates to issues around taboo and invisibility when discussing suicide in NZ. Each of the photographs is taken at a place where someone has taken their own life. This opened up a whole extra level of understanding around why I found the photographs so emotionally complex and why they seem so haunted. If the artist was hoping to open up discussion around suicide on this occasion it worked as James and I spent quite some time discussing people we had lost and events that had happened in the past; things that we would never have talked about otherwise.
