Photo: Courtesy the artist and McLeavey Gallery, Wellington
One of New Zealand’s leading photographers and artists, Yvonne Todd has announced she is now only working in AI. We believe as a professional in Aotearoa, she may be among the first.
Todd’s latest exhibition, Autochromes opens at Wellington’s McLeavey Gallery on November 26 and heralds this change.
Heralds because it’s a series of AI-generated photographs of winged female figures. They are, Todd writes in an exhibition statement, both “corporeal and spectral, neither fully divine nor entirely human. “Each figure, hovering “in a timeless zone.“
Angels, perhaps.
To emphasise their synthetic origin Todd has placed a digital watermark across each.
The work is both a homage to photography and a lament for its passing, as we know it.
Yvonne Todd won New Zealand’s inaugural leading contemporary art prize the Walters Prize back in 2001, a year after receiving her Bachelor in Fine Arts. She was made an arts laureate in 2019 and among her major exhibitions here and overseas, was the survey Creamy Psychology which took over the entire City Gallery Wellington in 2015.
Todd’s photography has always been staged and controlled, playing with the tension between artifice and reality. But, even so, this change will come for many as a shock.
