Past Exhibitions - 2020

Four Publications, some word

5.00 - 7.00pm Monday 7th December

The Engine Room and Whiti o Rehua School of Art invite you to celebrate four 2020 publication projects: Te Manu Huna a Tāne by Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen; Incredibly Hot Sex With Hideous People by Bryce Galloway; It does no harm to wonder / the Body of the Work by Richard Reddaway; and News From the Sun by Harry Culy, Justine Varga, and Shaun Waugh.

There will be art, refreshments, and a reading by Martin Patrick from his new work in progress.

How Now?

Siân Stephens
Sabina Rizos-Shaw

30 September - 16 October 2020

How Now? provides an immersive multimedia experience, challenging how one thinks and feels about the unnatural processes integral to the dairy and beef industries. The viewers are given an opportunity to adorn a cow udder as they walk through the show, which displays jarring yet satirical depictions of the realities of the dairy industry’s practices. Engaging with understandings of consent and playing with the concepts of commodity fedishism, sultry fascination, and morbidly hilarious denial. The exhibition provokes empathy, and puts the viewer in a position to become a non- human animal for a short time, in a fresh and humorously irreverent way.

Sian Stephens and Sabina Rizos-Shaw are two Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artists, who studied Fine Arts at Massey University and graduated in 2018. They have previously collaborated on the projects Eye of the Bovine and Atom Heart Mother. They both love cows.

Quicken

Poppy Lekner, Briarna Martelletti, Johanna Mechen, Mizuho Nishioka, Maria Sainsbury, Deidra Sullivan, and Virginia Woods-Jack

22 July - 14 August 2020

Quicken is an exhibition of photographic work engaging touch and tactility. Photography can sometimes seem like a barrier to intimacy and closeness, too often we put a camera between ourselves and the world and it becomes an obstacle, an obstruction. Yet a photograph is only made because light touches something which is sensitive to it; we may not see the magic, but every time a photograph is made this touch happens. Quicken includes work which utilises photography’s direct relationship to light, incorporating photograms, chemigrams and photographic ‘mistakes,’ but touch is also a concept that ranges through the physical to the emotional, and other work in the exhibition engages relationships with family, friends, home and the artist’s own unwell body.

Ghost Writing

Jess Richards

19 - 28 February 2020


GHOST WRITING is an installation which explores books and book pages as performative artefacts, and simultaneously discovers the narrative potential of fragmented fictional texts. The hybrid processes used to create this installation incorporate conceptual art practice and fiction writing. In GHOST WRITING, the reader re-writes the text as they read it. The reader/viewer is encouraged to performatively engage with the installation by exploring what is visible, partially visible, and concealed. To spend time touching and reading words, whispers, silence. 

HOW TO GHOSTWRITE:

Invite no witnesses. 

  1. Write the one story that haunts you so much you can’t tell it.

  2. Replace the ink cartridge of a photocopier.

  3. Place your untellable story face down on the glass.

  4. Place paper that shouldn’t go through a photocopier into the paper tray.

  5. Press copy. Wait. Move the story. Stop. 

  6. Place the copy in the paper tray. Layer the story on one page.

  7. Repeat 6) 7) till the layered story becomes invisible; a ghost, in ink.

  8. When the story is illegible, burn it, drown it, hang it or bury it.

  9. Take a breath.

  10. Look elsewhere.

  11. Write a story that you desperately want to tell. 

  12. Find the ghost in the story and ask it, ‘what do you want to be next?’