Two Rooms presents Cracker, a summer show featuring new releases by four of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading contemporary photographic artists – Greta Anderson, Conor Clarke, Ann Shelton and Shaun Waugh.

In informal English, the term ‘cracker’ refers to something exquisitely attractive, likeable or admirable. The generous contents of Cracker share a focus on the evocative and associative potential of colour, alongside a conscious foregrounding of photography as a subject. One might also think of the explosive nature of firecrackers, or even those who can crack a code. In this exhibition, everyday objects and situations, natural forms and geometries, are transformed through various lens-based media into loaded visual encounters. Anderson, Clarke, Shelton and Waugh deploy photography’s capacity for visual and conceptual abstraction in diverse ways – a ‘making strange’ – with one not always sure what one is looking at. Here, photography’s ability to render and describe is complicated by its contrasting ability to stage and fabricate – evoking memory, fiction and imagination.