Pink Castles, Burning Windows

Harry Culy’s Pink Castles, Burning Windows draws the gothic out of Aotearoa’s familiar surfaces, finding something strange, funny and quietly unsettling in places that might otherwise seem ordinary.

The exhibition continues the psychological terrain of Vampire Grove, Culy’s ongoing series of large-format black-and-white photographs, originally shown at The Dowse Art Museum. In that series, familiar streets and people of Aotearoa become the setting for an imagined gothic utopia.Yet, as Chelsea Nichols writes, “nothing here depends on elaborate illusion.” Culy does not transform the everyday so much as worry at it, loosening its surfaces until other possibilities begin to show through.Across these photographs, suburban streets, teenage gestures and private obsessions become sites of transformation. The gothic does not arrive through grand spectacle, but by increments: a cheap mask, a line of eyeliner, a faux castle. Each becomes a small aperture into a stranger world.Funny, tender and quietly disquieting, Pink Castles, Burning Windows lingers at the threshold between reality and imagination. These are images of enchantment under pressure, where the smallest gesture can alter the atmosphere of an entire scene.An accompanying text by curator Chelsea Nichols will be available in the gallery.