The starting point for ‘Uncle Albert’ is a diary containing drawings of things observed and plucked from popular culture and comics. The drawings, which are hybridised and newer forms of the original source imagery, produce a tone that is both abject and tragi-comic at the same time. Translated into freehand drawing directly onto the wall, Braunias creates a bombardment of imagery in shifting graphic styles that overlap, bump, leer, and relent. The intention is to retain the spontaneity associated with modernist stream-of-consciousness thought. In this process seemingly random associations become a …
The Darragh makes work using cheap, fun and discarded materials, pilfering objects directly from the op-shops and living rooms of ‘ordinary New Zealand’. Her finished artworks demonstrate a dense layering of familiar cliché’s played off against one another, re-configured and exaggerated. This contextual complexity is accompanied in Darragh’s work by a characteristic wit and delightfully irreverent sense of humour. During her prolific twenty year career her work has ranged from the ‘Queen of Kitsch’ era to the ‘grunge art’ of the mid nineties, and her new suit of sculptural works …
Eddie Clemens makes work by observing mundane aspects of suburban and rural life and turning them into commodities and packaged souvenirs. Instead of the usual tackiness and kitsch we associate with souvenir culture, Eddie creates manufactured, large scale works that are slick and modern objects yet have a fundamental playful element. In doing so he invents a new kind of ‘kiwiana’ through creating new icons of a New Zealand culture.
For this exhibition, Silage Globes Eddie represents an iconic image of rural New Zealand farming – the Silage heap covered and …
Curated by Richard Francis ‘into the groove’ is a collection of vinyl and lathe cut 7 inch records; a mini-audio-library showcasing some of New Zealand’s most prolific and well respected experimental music artists. Available for perusal in a make shift audio lounge, visitors can sit down, look through records, and indulge in the vanishing recreation of spinning 45’s. ‘into the groove’ features work by:
1/3 Octave Band
Birchville Cat Motel
Tim Coster
Francis/Guerra/Mattin/Stern
Gate
Rosy Parlane
Pumice
Bruce Russell
Pieters/Russell/Stapleton
Mark Sadgrove
Sandoz Lab Technicians
Seht
Peter Wright
Lauren Winstone
“I love the language. Words have temperatures to me. When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me.”
-Ed Ruscha
The fictitious names spammers create for their senders feel like “hot” words. They were the starting point for this work. In order to circumvent the filters designed to keep them out, email spammers auto-generate a host of virtual senders. Aiming to conserve something generated in an ephemeral process I rescued these names and collected them. The deluge of spam continued to fill my mailbox over the …
