Wellington artist Richard Shepherd’s work Romance (derivative) is linked to a 2015 photographic series Romance exhibited in the Courtenay Place Park Lightboxes.

Writer Rhydian Thomas describes the artist gleaning these images from the internet, gazing at the constant stream of images generated by the news, the shopping channel, the rugby, on his laptop. With his tripod-mounted camera viewfinder tracked to the computer screen, he takes sudden, random images that come into his peripheral vision. But the image that exists only in that instant is gone by the time the lens has shuttered, and Shepherd’s capture is always secondary, the tailwind of the moment of ‘romantic inspiration’ that caused it.

There’s a familiarity in these works – the glitched screenshot images, the disembodied weirdness of TV’s inherent déjà-vu. Made in the solitude of a bedroom, nervously subjective and relentlessly personal, these moments are formalised to become an artist’s view on the world, and then chucked out into the world like anonymous love letters dropped from a bridge.

Richard Shepherd is a Wellington-based artist and writer, who watches a lot of movies and dabbles in film theory.