Knick-knacks in conversation

Photographer Ingrid Boberg. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Photographer Ingrid Boberg is aware her 20-year-old students at Auckland University of Technology see things in a different way than she does. But that awareness helps her to construct her images.

"They have a finely attuned sense of 'cute'," she says. "There is an influx of cuteness - the whole thing from Asia, such as Hello Kitty, the younger generation is hooked into. They do it because there is an incredible need for going 'Wasn't that cute' and the feeling you get when looking at things that way.

"It's like seeing babies laughing or why we keep animals. We are slightly ashamed of feeling that way but when we feel it we love it, we want more of it."

In her last show, Boberg photographed sets of white china rabbits in seemingly intimate settings.

Home Beautiful at Whitespace is another series of images in which ceramic ornaments are assembled in carefully constructed domestic interiors to create what she calls conversations.

"I was interested in what was happening between china pieces that reiterated or created a metaphor for how we conduct ourselves in love relationships in our lives and how we do or don't display those in public," says Boberg.

The large pictures draw in and hold the viewer. They also contain few of the indicators of scale we automatically look for when reading a photograph. "The question I get is, 'Is that a real dog?"' Boberg says, referring to one of her pictures. "Of course it's real. Does it bark? No."

Boberg uses an archival inkjet process to print her works, creating soft colours and a matt surface.

"A lot of people refer to my work as paintings. I love colour. I went to art school wanting to be a painter."

While at art school in Melbourne in the 1970s, Boberg got caught up in the interest in photography sweeping through the Australian art world. Her constructed reality is a far cry from the documentary images which dominated New Zealand photography back then.

As part of the Auckland festival of photography, Whitespace is hanging Boberg alongside Barcelona-based British artist Rose Kowalski.

The two sets of works feed off each other, with both artists exploring the play of art on emotions.

Shifting Paradise is a 10-minute video showing the activity around Barcelona's Magic Fountain, especially tourists posing for snapshots.

"It was filmed from the point of view of the photographers - their ideas, their cameras, their performances in front of the camera," says Kowalski. "It is not a film about the fountain, it is a film about tourist spots."

The fountain's cycles are synchronised with music - such as the theme from Titanic - designed to push viewers' emotional buttons.

"In this place everyone feels they are a star," Kowalski says. "All my work is about looking for the emotional dialogue that happens between the public and the event."

Kowalski, who trained as a sculptor at St Martin's College in London, says video art for galleries must be treated as a sculptural process. "Going into a gallery, as you move around you engage physically in a work and choose how much you want to see.

"A video will work in similar ways. The audience will move in and out. They are not sitting in an anonymous space in a cinema being taken on a journey. Usually people go in there and take something away from the number of frames they see.

"For me, an artwork in a gallery points to some other space - the image itself is taking you somewhere else, or it is referring to something outside that space. Whether it is architecturally within the gallery or to make you look at the people next to you in another way, you get transported."

* Home Beautiful by Ingrid Boberg; Shifting Paradise by Rose Kowalski is at Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, to June 30