In our first exhibition for 2010 we present four emerging artists working with the enigmatic auras of photographs and objects. Max Creasy's carefully constructed images play between illusion and representation, between the facsimile and the real. They invite doubt about the process of photography and the viewer's relationship to it. His still life scenes are cast from plaster, hand painted and photographed. The process of painting interrupts our understanding of the role and effects of light in the photographic process. This layered construction of the scene creates an uncertainty in the eye of the viewer. These still life images present themselves as a mixture of references to the artistic process, duplication, and illusion.  With an eye for oddness, and for the tension between domesticity and nature, Roberta Thornley's photography explores the obsessive things people do in their anxious search for perfection and happiness. Her work is both painterly and cinematic, revealing what seem to be suspended moments in mysterious unresolved narratives. She says, "I want my photographs to ask questions, and I want them to be rich with narrative possibilities. At the same time I try to evoke atmospheres that oscillate between melancholy and desire. It's a difficult combination but I keep trying." Roberta Thornley graduated in 2007 from Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. Emidio Puglielli's work highlights our relationship to photographs, with a particular focus on their materiality and how it impacts our reading of the image. His series of works display both sides of a photograph at once. The photographs become objects allowing us to plug into our own references, histories and contexts and how we connect to images. Naomi White's Soap War features a faux bathroom made out of cardboard. On the mirror a sign says "No more soap girls! It was STILL being wasted". Her graduating series Out the Back explores work environments and their effect on employees. She has re-created the otherwise off limits staff areas using the packaging material that one might find there. The banal, neutral toned surroundings, peppered with motivational and instructional signage highlight the ultimately de-motivating atmosphere of these workplaces. The scenes are delightfully subversive and frank.