Camouflage: With Attitude is Anthony Davies's latest instalment of a personal world-view concerned with engagement and rooted in specifics. Through his foreign eyes comes a distillation of the New Zealand experience, most recently in and around Wanganui.
It is perhaps in such a tiny city/large town environment that the purest, most 'real' concentration of attitudes can be measured. People are isolated to an extent; groups as dissimilar as dog clubs, gangs and artists learn to co-exist. Tragedies (the Coral Burrows murder) and disasters (the 2004 flooding) are great levellers where faith in human nature can be restored.
Davies mines the media, getting input from a chaotic world and commenting often on the brutality he finds. Terrorism, tsunamis and Eminem's lyrics are a few recent preoccupations. Each work also displays jigsaw pieces of the rural angst at odds with the beauty of the landscape surrounding him.

Katy Corner
1 April 2005