Bartley & Company Art

Bartley & Company Art is delighted to give this body of work by Michael Mahne Lamb its first showing in Aotearoa.

Prototypes, which uses photography to explore the built environment and its constant flux, was developed for Lamb’s Master of Fine Arts degree completed in the US earlier this year.

Prototypes plays with how we see and experience the ever-changing urban landscape. The city here is presented as an abstract notion, with details appearing and dissolving in the same moment. Despite loyalty to his chosen medium, Lamb seeks to subvert conventional expectations of photography and its documentary role.

Analogue rather than digital processes are used to create the ‘source imagery’, not for nostalgia but because Lamb enjoys the material possibilities of film. It is what he then does with it in the transformation from the negative to physical print that takes photography to a new place in the world. Playing with scale, perspective, ‘framing’, the 2D-3D interface, and space itself, Lamb challenges his monochrome image objects to offer a physical experience alongside the visual.

Perceiving unlimited versions of our surroundings translates to unlimited versions of our future. The city holds ambiguity and contradictory qualities … it is impossible to grasp the wholeness of the world but by heightening our awareness and experience of certain aspects of our surroundings, we can at least be grounded in it.

Michael Mahne Lamb (Ngāti Kahungunu) is an artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. He has a Bachelor of Design (Honours) from Massey University and an MFA from the University of Hartford in Connecticut where he won an Installation Award and two scholarships. He first showed with Bartley & Company Art in 2020 in a two-person exhibition with Hamish Coleman. He is a co-director of photobook publisher Bad News Books.