One of the photographers in the Unnerved: The New Zealand Project exhibition at the Ian Potter Gallery in Melbourne was Ava Seymour, the Auckland based photo-media artist.

The work shown was from Seymour's 'Health Happiness and Housing' series:

Seymour travelled the country from Auckland to Invercargill, photographing concentrations of state housing in places like Otara, Glen Innes, Porirua, the Hutt Valley and Brockville to find bleak suburban backgrounds into which Seymour superimposed found, black and white images of retards, cripples and amputees. These characters show the frailty and disability of their lives--- human deformity, suburban claustrophobia and shattered dreams.

The titles include Welfare Mom, Minne Dean, State Highway 1 and Enema Nurse and in some of the images Seymour, in which she has superimposed images of children on to photographs of council houses, and replaced the children's faces with those of people with Down syndrome or other disabilities.

Seymour began making photomontages while based in Berlin in 1992. By cutting and reassembling found images from photographs, magazines and medical textbooks, she has produced work that is provocative, contentious and absorbing. The most obvious lineages in her work include Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. But whereas these classic exponents of Dada juxtaposition made art for specifically polemic ends, Seymour has disavowed political agency. Her work is predicated towards moods rather than messages, as she creates scenes that are simultaneously inviting and repellent.

The work does question the utopian vision which originally included reasonable housing for the economically disadvantaged who have relied on State houses.