| Summary: | The Light Horizon exhibition draws on photographs taken during my two weeks on the Ice as an Antarctic Artist’s Fellow, Dec. 2005. The show was significant for its scale and scope – 40 digital photo collage works, and lenticular prints, from eight different series. It represents the culmination of my most significant research outputs from the ‘Antarctica’ project to date and included works selected from the exhibitions The Dark Continent, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, Jun-July 2007, and The Weight of Water, Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington, Sept 2007. This exhibition occupied both the downstairs and upstairs galleries at Two Rooms, one of New Zealand’s leading galleries. [583] Commentary: This research acknowledges Antarctica as a complex site that cannot be summed up in one particular artistic approach. The images I produced represent a major departure from my previous photographic practice and constitute a range of approaches differing considerably from the majority of photography undertaken on the Continent. In my work landscape was the starting point for a series of meditations on Antarctica’s heroic age of exploration, Antarctica as a place of speculation and wonder, a site of scientific study and more recently commercial speculation. Digital montage enabled me to overlay past and present, the scientific and cultural, while the visual trickery of the lenticular process (first used in The Dark Continent, 2007) provided further conceptual shifts, emphasizing the uncertainty and instability of the landscapes in view. Virginia Were in Volatile Imaginings, Art News New Zealand, Winter 2008, wrote: “Megan Jenkinson’s visit to Antarctica has spawned an extraordinary series of photographs, which present a post-romantic view of our engagement with nature’… ‘[her work is] like an extended love poem to a place she found both confounding and inspiring’… ‘Jenkinson’s photographic montages are brilliant evocations of these atmospheric phenomena [auroras and mirages], visual tricks from the imagination of this acclaimed artist’. Reviewed in The NZ Herald and 5 works collected by Te Papa Tongarewa. [1,214] • Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography, 2008, receiving additional public exposure as a result. • Five Works collected by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. • Volatile Imaginings’, Artist’s Profile, Art News, New Zealand, Winter, 2008, pages 72 – 75. • Adam Gifford, ‘Changing View of a Frozen Land,’ review, in the New Zealand Herald, illustrated, 20.5.09 • Sharu Delilkan, ‘Trick of the Light,’ review in The Aucklander, illustrated, 7.5.08 • Gallery Talk on the exhibition, Two Rooms (in connection with the 2008 Auckland Festival of Photography), 11.6.08 • Gallery talk to members of the Paradise Art Group. • The exhibition was advertised in the following: Art News, New Zealand, Winter 2008 (full page colour advertisement); Art Zone April/June 2008 (full page); and the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival ’08 booklet (1/3 page). • “I was horrified by the Brilliance of your work. My jaw dropped open as I tried to comprehend how you achieved it all.” (Email from Greta Anderson, ex student and tutor at Elam).
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