The New Zealand Herald, Arts Section

Weirdness and Wit Fused with a Fine Savagery 

By T J McNamara

More self-consciously grand and dramatic with intricate levels of meaning is the photographic-video works of Julie Linowes Firth at Artis Gallery until August 27.

This technically impressive show is called Stain and it creates a strange world where a beautiful white-clad woman struggles with her nightmares. They are not historical documentary shots in the way of much New Zealand photography but surrealist-staged scenes in the manner of the American Joel Peter Witkin. In a typical work called, Holding Cell, the woman is in a tent with the sands of the desert beyond. Hanging from a meat hook is a butchered carcass of a pig which she embraces. On the floor are keys and a garter, and broken glass. Within the pig image is a smaller portrayal of the woman, ritual regalia around her neck, contemplating her crotch in a mirror in the way advocated by feminists in the past.

It's all very theatrical and the fleshiness and the mirrors continue throughout the show in dream worlds of light and landscape, stone, snow and harsh tar seal. It makes for odd, yet powerful images but the meaning is obscure. With so many dead pigs, there must be a theme linked to Jewishness where pork is forbidden nourishment. So much red raw meat seems linked to desire - the woman has red fingernails - yet, paradoxically, she is attacked but also made ecstatic by desire. Always, there is a sense of alienation and threat.The best way into this strange, yet curiously memorable show is probably through the simplest of the images called Moving Immobility where the threatened woman is alone of the harsh tarmac of a straight road between hills dusted with snow. In the foreground is a stain of blood.

The work presents a special, disturbing view of the way dreams are a special kind of spiritual reality.