Transparencies (2015 - ongoing )

“Transparencies” explores a trajectory of tropical modern architecture from Africa to the Pacific during the 1950s to 1970s. This project experiments with 35 mm colour slides from an archive gifted by Stevenson’s father, who was an architect for the British colonial service in Nigeria and Solomon Islands. These images exploit faults in the analogue slides such as mould blooms, scratches, odd colours and incorrect exposures in a manual process: layered slides on a light box that are rephotographed. The works attempt to cast an alternative light on an era of colonial-modernism in the tropics.

The works juxtapose imagery from Nigeria to the Solomon Islands, including colonial infrastructure such as General post offices, telephone exchange buildings, training schools and Public Works Department buildings. They are from a larger body of images and moving image pieces in progress that searches to identify a decolonising dialogue between colonial-modern architectural structures and contemporary perspectives in post-colonial countries.

Exhibited at ArtWest Exhibition, Auckland, 2018. Awarded photographic prize, judged by curator Ioana Gordon-Smith.