No Neutral Spaces: Framed and Unframed: Seeing (and Almost Missing) Mark Adams

A reflection on presentation, framing, and conceptual legibility in Mark Adams’s survey exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery, 2025.

No Neutral Spaces is a space for honest, critical conversations about art, culture, and ideas that refuse to conform or stay comfortable. This blog questions the frameworks and assumptions that shape what we see, say, and value. It’s about pushing beyond polite consensus to engage with complexity, power, and nuance—inviting readers to think deeply and speak openly.

Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua is showing at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki from 29 March to 17 August 2025. It’s the first comprehensive survey of Adams’s photographic practice, spanning more than five decades of image-making across Aotearoa, the Pacific, and Europe. I visited with my good friend Nikita on 6 June. This isn’t a formal review. It’s a reflection on my encounter with the show. What caught me, what tripped me up, and what stayed with me after I left.

Let me say this plainly: the work itself is stunning. Emotionally resonant and strikingly beautiful in that way only silver gelatin photography can be- deep, luminous, patient. Mark Adams knows how to make an image hold space. 

One thing I should say upfront is that I often experience wall text fatigue. Even as someone who spends a lot of time in galleries, I often skip the didactic panels unless I absolutely have to. Sometimes I’m tired, rushing, or just overstimulated. But more often it’s because the language puts me off. Too many wall texts frame the work in overly academic terms instead of plain English, and I don’t want to decode a paragraph just to start decoding the work. I want to see what I can pull out on my own first. That’s not a criticism of this show’s wall texts. To be honest, I mostly skimmed past them. But it’s part of how I engage, and it shapes what I notice.

These photographs are slow-burning containers of memory, tension, land, and time. They ask you to sit with them. And yet, I kept noticing things around the edges. More like disruptions than distractions, they were little choices in how the work was presented that rubbed against the quiet power of the images themselves. They shifted the weight. And once I saw them, I couldn’t stop seeing them.

But I found myself fixating, probably unfairly, maybe unavoidably, on the way some of the panoramic works were framed and hung. The images themselves were immaculately composed: long, horizontal vistas sliced across multiple panels, with every shoreline, ridge, and architectural line matching up from one print to the next. But the frames didn’t. They seemed off. Sometimes just 10mm, sometimes closer to 20, but definitely not staggered deliberately. This didn’t come across as poetically dissonant. Rather it just felt… off. It introduced an unintended noise, a disruption between image and object, that felt at odds with the precision of Adams’ photographic technique. I commented on it more than once. It was the kind of thing that pulls you out of an otherwise immersive experience. Like bad CGI in an otherwise beautiful film, or that orchestral swell in Godzilla Minus One that made me think of the opening to Pharoahe Monch’s Get the Fuck Up. Once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t let it go, but I wondered whether that was the point, what was it trying to say?

The seating also felt off, this was particularly noticeable on the longest panoramic piece which had two benches, spaced just far enough apart that you couldn’t sit directly in the middle. This seemed counter to my desire to sit from a central vantage point and take in the whole piece. What I wanted to do was allow the work to unfold around me. But I couldn’t. I had to choose a side, and given how long I had been in the gallery by this stage I needed that seat. Because of this, I found myself moving on much faster than I would have preferred to.

The location of the exhibition within the gallery didn’t help either. “Level Two” at Auckland Art Gallery sounds straightforward, but it’s actually the third floor. Ground, then First, then Second. And up there? It’s just Adams. No other exhibitions. A few closed doors that looked like classrooms or offices, but otherwise, nothing. And while the show itself deserved every inch of that space, the isolation was hard to ignore. I came specifically to see it, and even then, I realised I’d never actually been to that part of the building before. Which made me wonder how many people don’t make it that far. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t know. Or their energy runs out. Maybe their kid is losing it on the first floor and the rest of the gallery visit gets quietly abandoned. As a parent of a 19-year-old young man who is neurodivergent and unsteady on his feet, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in a gallery or museum watching like hawks, just in case he stumbles. I’m very used to having had to be that parent.

Back at work, I talked about the show with a colleague who knows Mark Adams, and she told me something that reframed (literally) one of my biggest bugbears. The uneven hanging is intentional. A known Mark Adams thing. A way of marking time. She said it’s about (amongst other things) showing how long he spends in those environments, sometimes hours, standing in the water, returning to the same spot over weeks or sometimes years, lining things up with care. The images are taken across hours or days, not in a single sweep. I’d actually said something similar to Nikita as we stared at the work at the time, talking about the way the focus shifts slightly between panels, how the water sits still in one and blurs in another, how the conditions seem to slightly change. I had already noticed it, but this gave it a frame. The misalignment wasn’t just a quirk of presentation. It was a signal. A record of presence, of return.

And conceptually? It works. That’s the hard one to learn, kids. You can make a choice that’s deeply rooted in your practice, tied to your kaupapa, and still have it fall flat or not hit fully for the visitor in the encounter. Especially if the context isn’t clear, if it requires you having knowledgeable or specific ways of seeing. If you don’t know it’s intentional it runs the risk of looking wrong. Distracting. A quiet fracture in an otherwise seamless experience. But again, that’s if people notice at all.

Which got me thinking. If framing can trip us up visually, what does it do when it’s embedded in language?

That’s where the naming came in. Some of the works in this show were grouped and described, in wall text and supporting materials, as part of Cook’s Sites. The term has a long history in Adams’s practice, including earlier publications, and I think it’s meant to be deliberately loaded. A phrase that calls attention to how these places have been framed through colonial narratives. The photographs themselves are quiet and ambiguous, full of presence and patience. They aren’t celebrating him. But standing there in the gallery with Nikita, we still found it uncomfortable. We talked about how easily someone could read that title at face value, especially without any framing text to complicate it. Especially now, when everything around land and history and naming feels raw.

Photography isn’t always read as conceptual work. And without a clear signal, a phrase like Cook’s Sites can come across as neutral. It risks suggesting that those places only became significant through his arrival. That they mattered because he saw them.

But they didn’t belong to him. They were there before him. He passed through. The places remained.

Nikita and I both noticed it straight away. And we talked as we walked back through, about how easy it is to forget how language shapes perception. How even simple, unexamined phrases can reinforce colonial frames. Not everyone questions language like that. Nikita and I actively talk about these frameworks in all sorts of contexts, turning them over and figuring out where we stand. But it would be remiss of me to assume everyone does the same. It’s easy to walk past without ever noticing the conceptual frameworks — especially with someone like Adams, who is a master of embedding concept. I guess this is just a reminder that when language goes unexamined, it shapes how the work is received. It filters what we see, what we think we’re seeing. And we all have a responsibility to reconfigure and recontextualise those frameworks, whether we are viewers, artists, or institutions. Because habits become structures. And unless you push back on them, they keep doing quiet damage.

Especially in a show like this, so rooted in land, memory, and the layered violence of looking, the words we use to describe the work are part of the work. Or at least, they should be.

So no, this isn’t a takedown. This is a reflection. A reminder that even brilliant work can be let down by the quiet choices around it. And that sometimes, it still cuts through. In this case, the choices weren’t mistakes. They were deliberate, thoughtful, and conceptually grounded, but not immediately legible to everyone. I had the good fortune of knowing a few high-level conceptual photographers. That helped. I had the context to stay with it, to feel it out. But that kind of access isn’t universal. And without it, the work risks being missed or misread.

It didn’t make it easy, but it earned the time I gave it. I could have missed something important if I hadn’t. Despite loving Adams’s aesthetic and thematic preoccupations, I nearly walked away holding only a surface impression. But staying with it revealed what was beneath. What was embedded. Not just to look, but to keep looking.

Hayley Walmsley (Ngāti Kawau, Ngāti Tautahi, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Ōtautahi. She makes work about art, systems, and the sneaky ways meaning gets made, and sometimes missed. She writes No Neutral Spaces because she’s too grumpy to let things slide, and too soft to throw the first punch.