Exhibitions

• Relations

  ANNE RAMSDEN
  October 8–October 29, 1988

  Anne Ramsden continues her ongoing exploration into dominant systems of knowledge and structures of power in Western culture and society. Her exploration has been articulated in works that incorporate different mediums and a shifting emphasis while continuing to critique colonialism, the construction of systems of thought, nature, culture, discourses of power and the experience of otherness.

  Ramsden uses the museum as a text with its own system of meaning and enforcement of meaning. Through the choice of objects and their positioning, museums construct a version of history that is accepted as authoritative ands unassailable. The notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘preciousness’ often associated with the presentation of museum exhibits is broken through Ramsden’s use of a shifting photographic approach or style. In her words: “The images draw on diverse photographic genres in a mostly formal sense: self-portrait shadow, beastial diorama, Romantic landscape, documentary”. The museum does not acknowledge its own subjectivity, however, Ramsden includes in her works evidence of the artist’s activity and tends to more frankly acknowledge them as products of a point of view rather than autonomous objects which present themselves as unassailable fact.