Civilisation's Fall Caught on Camera

Spiderman may have already caught your eye on Courtenay Place of late. It’s an image by Toi Poneke Gallery’s next exhibitor.

John Lake is one of eight artists exhibiting at the Light Boxes space in the new Courtenay Place Park, and his work is returning to the gallery in early June with The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization: Part 1.

Visitors to the gallery may be a bit disorientated at first, if what they're expecting is the usual line-up of photography along the gallery walls. Instead, John Lake has chosen to place the images in a seemingly ad hoc fashion – using the full dimensions of the gallery from floor to ceiling, and following a more intuitive logic. The images will be in a range of sizes and formats, and the proximity between them will allow the viewer to interpret the images in a variety of ways.

John, who has an interest in anthropology and psychoanalysis, says this exhibition blends documentary photography, fantasy and allegorical narrative in our imaginations.

"We seem, as humans, to continually fantasise about notions of collapse and death in quite a playful way," says John. "People are obsessed with it. Many forms of media, particularly news media, are almost inherently based around death."

This collection of photographs features people playing alternative roles to their current reality. Some instances are subtle, for example, people exaggerating their gender roles.

More than a year's work makes up this exhibition, mostly of images from the Hutt Valley. The collection includes images from the Medieval Markets in Levin, school balls, young Air Training Corps cadets on Anzac Day, Halloween in the Hutt Valley, boy racers in Masterton and a large-scale evangelical rock concert.

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization: Part 1 opens at 5.30pm on Thursday 5 June and runs until the end of the month at Toi PMneke Gallery, 61-63 Abel Smith Street.