BIO: Rachel Hope Allan is an artist and educator from New Zealand currently based in Ōtepoti. She received her Master of Fine Arts with distinction from Dunedin School of Art, where she is Principal Lecturer and Studio Coordinator in Photography.
Her creative practice is firmly located within a contemporary discourse that delves into the ritualistic nature of photography itself. Her practice ranges from early, first-generation, wet darkroom processes to digital and hybridized liquid photography.
Fascinated by the notions of the authentic and the replicant, her work investigates loss, the fetishisation of objects, animals and process. Her relationship with photography is sometimes complicated: hiding from mountain lions clutching her 1940’s press camera, X-raying New Zealand’s most critically endangered native wildlife, and developing tintypes in the basements of historic houses. She has transformed herself into a knitted toy, blown up Rescue Annie Dolls, and metamorphosed men into birds.
Rachel exhibits both locally and internationally; including in Shutter Hub OPEN (2023/24), Cambridge University, UK, The National Contemporary Art Award, Waikato Museum, NZ (2023 & 2022), Postcards from Europe, Cambridge University, UK (2022), Gift, Ashburton Art Gallery (2022), Amsterdam International Art Fair (2019), Jarvis Dooney Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2018 & 2019), Tokyo International Art Fair, Tokyo (2017 & 2018). Yu Gallery, Shanghai, China (2017), & Ridiculous Sublime, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2016).
Rachel’s photobooks can be found in the collections of Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo, Japan, The George Eastman Museum, USA, The National Gallery of Australia , The Asia Pacific Book Archive, The Museum of New Zealand, Te Aka Matua Library, The National Library of New Zealand, The Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland City Libraries, Auckland University, Massey University, Victoria University, University of Canterbury, and The University of Otago.
EXHIBITION SUMMARY: Mark Bolland writes about the exhibition and accompanying book:
“Allan’s process in compiling this work some five years after the trip is characterized by the careful editing and re-editing of a sequence of images that evoke something between a holiday-gone-wrong and the kind of disaster tourism in which she would not ever engage. The images, and her accompanying writing, reveal the underlying concerns that brought about this new publication and exhibition: the appropriation and mistreatment of First Nations cultures, the poverty and the grubby tour-istification of the eponymous sublime spectacle. Most of all though, this dark work was prompted by the heartbreak of the fate of an Orca at the local Niagara Falls Marineland Zoo.”