Rachel Hope Allan: Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel

Rachel Hope Allan: Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel
13 May – 18 June 2022
6 Castle Street, Dunedin
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 11 am – 5 pm
and by appointment.

For an appointment, contact us at radner@rdsgallery.co.nz.

A significant dimension of Rachel Hope Allan’s work is an investment and attentiveness to photographic technologies and their cultural histories, extending to early photographic forms such as tintypes and ambrotypes. She has a special interest in what is often called “wet photography,” and is known for her work with a 1940s Linhof camera. The photographs included in “Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel,” are a more recent extension of these interests into digital technologies. She describes her project in the preface to COKE & POPCORN: THE IMAGE AND THE SERIES (Dunedin: Rachel Hope Allan, 2017), which includes reproductions of a number of photographs on view in the exhibition “Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel.” Here, she defines it as “…an attempt to negotiate the critical discussion around ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of image making in the contemporary context.”

Shot on an iPhone over a period of years, during a number of visits to Japan, most recently, December 2019, the resulting images are “embedded within a contemporary dialogue that,” Allan explains, “explores the ritualistic act of photography itself.” Art historian Federico Freschi, thus, comments that “Rachel Hope Allan’s photographs present a quietly compelling alternative to the conventional travelogue….With their high-contrast, saturated tones and seemingly arbitrary compositions, they have a furtive, fleeting quality that evokes both the elusiveness of the moment and the instability of memory.” In the same vein, the photographer Lucian Howard underlines that “[f]or Allan the printing is as much a part of the creative process as capturing the image––every choice carries meaning.” By breaking with the current practice of reserving the photographic print for those images produced in a high culture context, destined by their technological origins for the art world, as opposed to INSTA or FB, Allan blurs the borders between what she calls “‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of image making,” leading the viewer to reconsider these hierarchies.

The photographs in this exhibition bear all the marks of the artist’s sensibility, yet they also record her experiences as a traveler, an activity that links the series with contemporary populist practices. On the one hand, she documents the particularities of Japanese culture as one which, in historian Takashi Shogimen’s words, “…is characterised by the distinctive way in which it transforms foreign cultures it assimilates….It ‘Japanizes’ them without exception.” On the other, her photographs are fully “autobiographical” in Lucian Howard’s terms, depicting “a particular vision of Tokyo that Allan has fallen in love with.”

RDS Gallery, May 2022

References
-Allan, Rachel Hope. COKE & POPCORN: THE IMAGE AND THE SERIES. Dunedin: Rachel Hope Allan, 2017.
-Fox, Alistair and Hilary Radner, eds.,RACHEL HOPE ALLAN: NOT JUST ANOTHER SHINJUKU LOVE HOTEL: Essays on the Occasion of the Exhibition "Rachel Hope Allan: Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel," RDS Gallery, 6 Castle Street, 13 May - 18 June. Dunedin: RDS Gallery, 2022. [Includes essays by Federico Freschi, Lucian Howard, and Takashi Shogimen.]

Images
"Azuma Forever" (2021), 200 mm x 200 mm
"pastries & beer "(2021), 200 mm x 200 mm
"Not Just Another Shinjuku Love Hotel" (2022)
"puppy, baby, monkey" (2021), 200 mm x 200 mm
"Fukuro no Su Café" (2021), 200 mm x 200 mm