F4: The Interval
25 November, 2014 - 1 February, 2015
AV Gallery, Photography Gallery & Master Bedroom
Harry Iliffe, Dawn til Dusk (2014), Photograph
Life and art merge in this experimental collective in which, a family live and make art together exploring the dynamics of family life, collective memory and interpersonal relationships. Growing from the long-term artistic collaboration between the parents (Susan Jowsey and Marcus Williams) F4 is a conceptual and structural response to the introduction of children into this partnership.
The inter subjectivity of collaboration, the mediated nature of socialization in contemporary culture and the implications of power relations in these contexts remain broad themes within the collaborative model. Familial relationships and the investigation of representations of family have become particular, with attention to the history of that representation through photography.
At the same time the process and the artwork of F4 operate within the realm of the subconscious; specifically, the blend of ‘the imaginary’ and ‘the lived experience’ which is characteristic of children’s daily lives, conflating and intermingling layers of time and space within the context of domesticity and the family. The project utilises photography both visually and textually to do this and toys with its intrinsically paradoxical nature in terms of the photographic object and that which it signifies. The powerful symbolic potential of the needlework and fabric employed, is evocative of immediate and actual space, in contrast to the abstract space of the photographs. The interweaving and connecting function of these elements themselves refer to the domestic and suggest potentially gendered, feminine counterpoint to the mediated familial representation.
Born and educated and living in Auckland, New Zealand, Susan Jowsey and Marcus Williams have collaborated as artists for over 15 years. They have exhibited widely and have won major awards in New Zealand. F4 was formed in 2006 and consists of Susan Marcus and their two children Jesse and Mercy Williams.
