Land Ends

APT artist Melissa Moore’s other-worldy images are created on Hornby Island, a remote location in British Columbia. At turns strange, enigmatic, enthralling and always difficult to pin down Hornby is inhabited by an alternative, some might say escapist, community. The remarkable landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the alternative architecture which this community has built, and in which it lives provide an often ethereal stage for Moore’s work and continue Departure Lounge’s history of presenting unusual and innovative approaches to photographic portraiture.

In the accompanying book Land Ends, Mark Cousins proposes that although Moore features in many of the images, her work is not self-portraiture. He suggests hat in discovering her in numerous different guises, in different images, we are somehow intruding on her private reverie. In different images we encounter her sometimes dressed up, sometimes half hidden, always slightly obscured, sometimes – intriguingly – completely absent. Rather than using the landscape as a backdrop, she is almost part of it.

Moore’s photographs are a meditation on the relationship between identity and place, on escapism on performance and on the increasingly fluid definition of ‘the portrait’ in contemporary art and society.