2008
“Shelton’s remake focuses the viewer on art as a cultural construct and points to the reliance of traditional painting on sight. The mirror image of her paired photograph of Otira Gorge is anti-spectacle; it challenges the primacy of vision by locating the meaning beneath the photograph’s surface in a process which figuratively situates the ‘spectator’ beyond what is immediately apparent. The viewer is directed away from the act of looking to a world hidden from the surveyor’s categorising gaze where thinking and remembering are privileged and the cohesive logic of the visual field is shattered. This aspect of Shelton’s practice is consistent with the questioning of the primacy of the visual in the later half of the twentieth century by French theorists such as Jacques Derrida who believed that photography should be understood as writing or ‘text’.”
