Past Exhibitions - 2019
a sum less than its parts
Essi Airiniemi
Fraser Walker
9 - 18 Oct 2019
a sum less than its parts reinterprets fundamental properties of materials and re-imagines their entangled, temporal presence in human-initiated projects. The title of the exhibition alludes to Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological. Morton writes that if wholes formed through interconnections exist in the same way as their parts, the wholes should be seen as ontologically less, not more, than the totals of these parts.
The grown, found, unused, homemade, surplus and residual join in a spatial experiment of forms and assemblages, foregrounding the elemental qualities of each material and processes of making that suggest shared agencies between the human and non-human, organic and inorganic. These agencies are divulged through a collaborative sound component, where sound is considered as an interdependence, a thing between things.
Drawing by Ayla Wednesday
Eating Each Other / Ève Chabanon
17 - 27 Sept 2019
“We don’t talk, we write.” I painfully decipher the purple notebook she is holding near my leg. On stage Sons of Kemet are playing ‘My Queen is Julia Cooper’. I close my eyes. THE REACTIONS PLEASURE EMOTION VISION SMELL TASTE TOUCH HEARING THE VOCAL CORDS THE CRIES THE WAILS THE MURMURS. I love her handwriting. She is not writing, she is drawing, and at the moment I can’t stop smiling. THE HOARSENESS THE SOBS THE SHRIEKS. “Deal.” The letters appear on my screen. First word scripted in months. The keyboard squeaks. THE VOCIFERATION THE WORDS THE SILENCES THE WHISPERS THE MODULATIONS THE SONGS THE STRIDENCY THE LAUGHS THE VOCAL OUTBURSTS THE LOCOMOTION. Gosh, I love that song.
When people ask me what I am doing, I answer “I write, eh!” I am not lying. I used to write. I lost the language. I stopped articulating. That’s my story.
“And what do you write about? What is your field?” asked Solé the first time we met.
“About cultural perspectives and ceramics.”
“Say it again.”
“About how we are eating each other.”
“Anthropophagy?”
THE FAT THE PHOSPHORUS THE MERCURY THE CALCIUM THE GLUCOSE THE IODINE THE ORGANS THE BRAIN THE HEART THE LIVER THE VISCERA THE VULVA THE MYCOSE THE FERMENTATION THE VILLOSITY THE DECAY THE NAILS THE TEETH THE HAIR THE SKIN. Eyes open. She is gone. The song of the brasses is cracking my chest. A cold breeze is coming in. Fuck I miss her.
Eating Each Other follows a series of performative dinners and is Chabanon’s second solo exhibition in Wellington. The exhibition introduces her current research into Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history, the Arts and Crafts movement, and intellectual property rights through handmade ceramic works and collaborative elements.
Ana Iti
Maia McDonald
Dave Marshall
Hana Rakena
Jake Walker
Curated by Teresa Collins and Hanahiva Rose
From Here On Out presents works in clay by five artists from Aotearoa, exploring possible directions in ceramic matter, speaking to individual narratives and a range of contexts.
there are pictures of pots, but it’s more like, what’s going on around the pots – as a human with a limited time here on earth – to connect to the spirit of the land and my own wairua – dealing with media as old as humanity – there are a few places I know of that I keep in the back of my mind – rocks, shells, land formations – it’s all very tactile, like a remedy for too much heavy-headed disembodied time – you can see the hand of the maker in it – I vividly remember.
From Here On Out presents works in clay by five artists from Aotearoa, exploring possible directions in ceramic matter, speaking to individual narratives and a range of contexts.
Ceramic practice is often based in community, shared knowledge, and local histories. Clay passes through many minds and hands, physical processes and spaces; from practitioner to practitioner and earth to object. Ana Iti, Dave Marshall, Maia McDonald, Jake Walker and Hana Rakena represent a grouping of artists whose ceramic work exists within and contributes to creative communities in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. This exhibition encourages an engagement with contemporary art and craft discourses within Massey University and wider contexts, made possible by the generosity and willingness of these artists to share their knowledge and work.
From Here On Out
A Social Assemblage
Group Exhibition
Participating artists: Sexton Brown, Louie Neale, Barbara Fuchs, Chanette Buttner, Caroline Hollow, Suzy Costello, Nicole Galvin, Tevaine Purdie-Timoteo, Richard Reddaway, and Robert Bubp
15 - 31 May 2019
A Social Assemblage began with a provocation offered by two artworks made subsequent to fortuitously concurrent residencies at Arquetopia, Puebla, Mexico in 2015: Massey University Senior Lecturer Richard Reddaway’s “Ahora, Vea Aqui” and Wichita State University Associate Professor Robert Bubp’s Las Callas Públicas.At a point in Bubp’s video installation, a Mexican street protester “flips the bird” at the artist recording the scene, and his, and by extension our, comfort crashes into uncertainty. He, we, become “othered”, our white, male, neo-colonial privilege revealed. And this mirrors the staging of the event Ahora, Vea Aqui” with a group of young, working-class, mostly indigenous Pueblans. Where they audience or participants? How were the hierarchies at play in both works disrupted, transformed, by the possibilities of exchange?
This developed into One’s Own and Others’ Otherness in 2018, workshops collaboratively undertaken with students from Wichita State University that combined the participants’ particular expertise: Richard’s in making wearable, noisemaking objects and Robert’s in teasing out and collecting with sound and video people’s experiences.
Now, in the Engine Room, collaborating participants have been invited to consider the dynamics at play in socially engaged practice. The invitation is to explore through making ways of understanding power and its lack: for some the possibility of losing privilege through others’ empowerment, and for others the dismal prospect of “business as usual” decaying further into the grim reality of racism, sexual abuse and other expressions of power. How can, how does, making things together work to construct community, even a community of difference? And particularly one that recognises the importance of the “promotion of an ecology of knowledges combined with intercultural translation” in the recognition of the significance of our own and others otherness, to cite Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South?
Participating artists: Sexton Brown, Louie Neale, Barbara Fuchs, Chanette Buttner, Caroline Hollow, Suzy Costello, Nicole Galvin, Tevaine Purdie-Timoteo, Richard Reddaway and Robert Bubp.
Ships in the Night
Latham Zearfoss
21 February - 15 March 2019
ships in the night is an allegorical consideration of how bodies and objects are increasingly choreographed and stymied within our crumbling colonial world order. New sculptural works by American artist Latham Zearfoss formally and conceptually align through the reverent use of low-grade packing material – brown paper, cardboard and tape. Resembling an abandoned logistics company, ships in the night is comprised of several strategic aesthetic interventions that create dynamic formations of suspicious packages that may elicit joy, skepticism, desire, wonder, fear and panic. ships in the night poetically interrogates the valorisation of a global ‘free market,’ in contrast to the violent, jingoistic fervor that has gripped so many nations. Put more plainly, decreased regulation (increased flow of goods) synchronises with decreased value for human life (increased militarisation of borders). All the while, cornerstones of liberal humanism like class mobility and governmental transparency and a shared belief in fundamental human rights get carried away by the changing tides, passing into shadow as though they were mere ‘ships in the night’.
Latham Zearfoss lives and works in Chicago, and holds a MFA from the University of Illinois. They are a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice forms around time-based projects. They work largely in video and sound, object installations and also produce music and publications. Zearfoss has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the USA and held a number of solo exhibitions in the USA, including YesX1000 (2015) in Chicago, and Bruising Darkness (2014) in Baltimore. In 2017 their exhibition Intents and Purposes at the Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago included a number of different works in a variety of media. Concerned with inherited queer histories and the everyday realities of social and political life on the margins, Zearfoss’s intersectional practice focuses on formative experiences of “selfhood and otherness”.
The Nature of Things
Neil Aldridge
2 - 12 April 2019
The Nature of Things is a fifteen-minute sensory experience. Enveloping the audience in an aural meditation, the work explores continuities and discontinuities between environments in India and Aotearoa New Zealand—seemingly a world apart, yet both an integral part of the same biosphere.
It signals notions of our changed and changing relationship with the natural world and our collective global responsibilities towards the environment and each other. The audience are invited to contemplate the precarious tensions and paradoxes, expressed through our current symbiotic relationship with the natural world. It combines environmental field recordings from India and Aotearoa New Zealand with manipulated piano and singing bowls.
Thanks to Earthskin Muriwai Creative Residency.
Neil Aldridge is a sonic artist working with music and environmental recordings. He spent fifteen years in the music industry in London followed by ten years in the film industry in Wellington before moving into academia. He has created work for the London Aquarium and more recently exhibited a long-form process-music composition. In 2018, he completed a month-long artist’s residency at Earthskin Muriwai, to compose, record, and craft the audio component of ‘The Nature of Things’, which was subsequently exhibited as a collaboration with mixed-media artist Charlotte Crichton at the Performance Arcade 2019.