Tomorrow evening my friend Zara Pears and I are opening a duo show called Respite, at Matchbox Studios. 

The blurb for my bit of the show says it pretty well, I reckon. It's:

"Michael Edge-Perkins is a Christchurch-born, Wellington-based photographer of objects. He works in a by-turns warmly and cooly haunted visual space that is bounded somehow by geometry, folk music, still life painting and psychology. His contribution to Respite looks at ways of bringing the outside to bear on what physically, mentally and spiritually troubles us.

You can see more of his work at www.syncretismassociates.com, including his 2013 solo show at Matchbox, These things happen, which explored what it could mean to make folk photographs, and his contributions to the Matchbox group shows Jukebox, Metropolis, and View."

For me it's a bringing together of some older works that I've wanted to show for a while but hadn't found a meaningful way of grouping them. Zara's recent work about metaphorical escape from restrictions got me thinking about escapism, not in the usual somewhat pejorative sense of that word but in the sense of seeking relief from what's inside.

It's been a challenging year for me in terms of artistic production. I have two injured wrists, so camera handling and long writing spells have been out of the question for much of the time. This has however allowed for a fair whack of introspection and some new direction has come from this. Not too much to share as yet, sorry.

Here's the poster and my pictures from the show.

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