December 2021
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Linda Gair – Conflict of Interest
3 – 22 December 2021 Central Gallery Art is a great platform for political comment! In this body of work Linda Gair has sought to express some of her opinions regarding several topical issues we are facing today in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. In Gair’s view, the Unitary Plan has allowed builds of uniform, ‘low-rise affordable’ housing, which run the risk of freezing their underwhelming architecture in the aesthetic of the early 2020’s. The many new occupants of these low-rise developments will increase traffic congestion to a point that our roads cannot hope to cope with, since they have long ceased to cope. As a Bayswater resident, Gair is all too familiar with the growth pains of urban development – with only one road providing access to the peninsula, new development without equal investment in infrastructure has had, and will continue to have a notable impact on daily life. Government and City Councils are still talking about how to get cars off the roads and people onto public transport. Will there be a second Harbour Bridge or tunnel crossing? When will the monumentally expensive feasibility studies get these long-awaited plans into action? It seems that myopic band-aids continue to be patched over these ever-growing issues. Moreover, Gair argues that the Council’s dogged commitment to the improvement of Auckland’s CBD has become the death knell to scores of businesses and a ‘mammoth moving road cone maze’ for the commuter. Surely public duty is to serve the public interest, and is therefore tied to the collective interest of the entire community. This exhibition makes commentary around these local development qualms, as well as wider political forces such as climate change inaction and the devastating impact of COVID-19. |
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Sampler – Members Show
4 – 22 December 2021 Street Front Gallery Depot Members form a core part of our creative community, and help enable Depot Galleries to present a varied and accessible exhibition programme across our two gallery spaces at 28 Clarence Street, Devonport. The annual Members Show provides an opportunity for Depot Artspace’s creative supporters to showcase a sample of their broader practice to local audiences. |
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Rhea Maheshwari – Ethereal Cosmography
11 – 22 December 2021 Central Gallery This project explores geometric abstraction as a method to frame transcendental ideas. Rhea’s drawings emerge from literal guide-lines made from a particular combination of horizontal and vertical ruled pencil lines which guide a viewer’s eyes up, down and across the picture plane. Tools of Euclidean geometry (pencils, rulers and protractors) are utilised in her practice as she make moves and countermoves within this structural schema to achieve a sense of wholeness or balance within the paper substrate. As she draws connective elements with her drawing tools, the separate compartments begin finding routes and connecting to each other to create something whole, balanced and full. The whole design, as a result of these cumulative relationships, expresses a certain logic or quality that is greater than its individual parts. This methodology draws from non-dualist philosophies which emphasise the attainment of balance or equilibria between mind and body through action. The resulting works might act as meditative and contemplative spaces for a viewer to immerse themselves in. |
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R. Gibson – Worshipping the Product
11 - 22 December 2021 Feature Wall 1 What is it that successfully takes us to the ‘something greater’, the hedonist haven of a reassuring product, the manufacture of desire in which we happily embrace the rudimentary wantonness of the mirrored path? Gibson’s new works look at product worship, consumer behaviour, and contrived marketing environments in the perfect world of need and seduction. The artist explores manufactured entrapment and the sparkling delight of products and consumables that seduce us with a calculated appeal that we cannot bring ourselves to deny. Paintings and prints are charged with suggestive meaning, Gibson provokes thought regarding consumer need and drives home bucket loads of ironic humour found in the marketing charade. |
January 2022
February 2022
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Li Si-Rong & Jenny Zhong - And So, We Build An Amusement Park On The Uninhabited Island
12 Feb - 2 Mar 2022 Central Space Covid-19, pandemic, we are stuck at home. Our daily circle has shrunk from the entire city to home, and the majority of our activities have moved to virtual spaces. In retrospect, quarantine is like everyone returning to their own uninhabited island. On our uninhabited island, we frequently put ourselves in a trance by staring at a specific space without thinking anything. Just letting thoughts wander around with peace, like meditation with eyes opened, creating tranquility in our body. Dreaming and daydreaming. We are fantasising about a beautiful illusion. Darkness will be defeated when we are deep in fantasy. We weave one beautiful story after another, gazing at one attractive creature after another. Everything is wonderful and luminous. Jenny Zhong Jenny Zhong’s artworks are responses to states of fantasising. Fantasy can bring positive energy to people, and it can relieve the pressure brought by everyday life. Painting can be a form of communication with imagination in her creations. Each colour on Zhong’s brush are distinct characters with distinct personalities. Each piece of art is made up of different colours. Their union creates a one-of-a-kind world that is entirely theirs, as well as a record of their personal life story. Each story is a microcosm of life, a flourishing bubble influenced by the artist’s interactions with their spirits. The audience will generate touch through the guidance of play and use touch to extend and connect further with each piece. When the sensation hits a crucial tipping-point, a “push” will activate the delay unit, and as a result of intuitive play, the work rotates. Li Si-Rong Li Si-Rong’s work is composed of diary, memories, daily debris, objects, gaze, empathy poems, and creative and theoretical reflection. On Si-Rong’s uninhabited island, she lives with many objects. She resembles their centre. They must surround her and support her to complete daily routines. She knows that she does not need much since everything in her everyday life revolves around the same objects at home. She knows that they have been watching her every single move and that they are coequal. She is viewed by everyday objects all the time – this is a close and reciprocal relationship. Considering the object-gaze and the concept of object-oriented ontology, Si-Rong sought to redraw everyday objects in an abstract way; an attempt to rearrange them in a new way. She presents everything in daily life that we take for granted via personal observation and reorganisation in the form of ceramics, photography, poetry and painting. |
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Abbie Twiss - Monochromes
19 Feb - 9 Mar 2022 Street Front Space With her older brother, Abbie Twiss would watch black and white films on Sunday afternoons, decades ago. Those memories have a spark of romantic nostalgia about them; the people, the different eras, fast-paced tap dancing, the changes in fashion and cultures. Being a small child in the busy local Auckland art scene of the late ‘70s to early ‘80s, Twiss remembers being little, unable to see much of the artwork on the gallery walls, it was all just a sea of tall long legs with feet on the ground. They were up there conversing through spoken language. Twiss was just learning to communicate with Signed English for the Deaf, before the legitimate use of NZSL became the norm. She had to find her parents’ feet in those exhibitions in order to avoid getting lost or stepped on, so she went under dining tables, watching artists’ and writers’ noisy combined feet move and beckon each other. This is Abbie Twiss’ first exhibition without colour, incorporating a range of early work and recent editions that sit on the periphery of her vibrant Pop Art-inspired practice. Painted vignettes of early memories are reduced to a monochromatic palette here, like recollections in the mind’s eye that alter as the decades pass. Far from fading from view however, while the insignificant details of Abbie Twiss’ memories fall away and colours are lost to time, the key forms and emotions of a memory emerge in black and white. Pin-up models with bare feet and bikinis. The artist’s older brother used to collect those 1950s pin-up magazines. Crossed feet under the table. A mafia leader’s shoes. Twiss’ late birth-father’s leather boots on a chair. She did not grow up with him. A faint memory of her grandmother’s shoes. Ten years ago, Twiss was interested in a photograph of Paul Gauguin between his two children. She imagined that Gauguin seldom mentioned his exploits to his children who lived in Europe–they had not seen him very much during their lives when he was away in the Pacific. They possibly had no knowledge of his Tahitian models who became his lovers, which could have been on Gauguin’s own guilty conscience. Twiss wanted to paint this idea somehow, to play with this portrait in painting and demonstrate use of enamel-acrylic paint with freehand sign-writing techniques and to let it bleed naturally. To find a wood board size that matched the mood, she looked in the studio and found a 15 year-old painting of an unlively portrait that was made at a young age. She attacked it, sanding it with an electric sander, took off the coloured oil paint surface from the wood board for a day and repainted it with enamel-acrylic white. After constant thought for a few days, Twiss decided to add two of Gauguin’s models in the top row, above the artist and his children. The two models were known from being depicted in full colour, so painting them in monochrome felt more illuminating. |
March 2022
April 2022
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Denis Bourke Paintings
2 - 20 April 2022 Feature wall and Central Gallery This exhibition covers areas of interest that have been at work concurrently over several decades in Denis Bourke’s long-standing practice. Bourke has travelled widely across Aotearoa New Zealand, and is a longtime illustrator and recorder of land features. Reflecting his reaction to and engagement with the land, some works depict actual locations, mainly in Taranaki and Hawkes Bay. Also included are several works in which landform processes such as river action, volcanism–the discharge of magma onto the Earth’s surface–and tectonic activity are depicted in simplified forms with a diagrammatic quality. Another thread includes paintings based on non-art images, borrowed from the sciences of geomorphology and cartography. Some are large scale coloured renderings of actual diagrams (e.g. Geomorph) and maps (Green Section, Red Section), while others are imaginary compositions (Eight Views, A,B,C & D). The introduction of visual systems from disciplines removed from the traditional NZ landscape painting genre adds new layers of meaning and association. Outlining, borders, grids and encyclopedia or atlas colours are some of the borrowed techniques which emphasise two-dimensional flatness and provide a contemporary feel. A recent development is the idea of physical evolution and change over time extended to include the transformation of land and terrain by different cultural land uses. Aotearoa New Zealand’s earliest land patterns have been largely obliterated by successive human cultures, with modern land management informing the dominant visual patterns we observe. These cultural patterns can overlay earlier traces of land use, and all human-driven change can overlay the original geomorphology. The result is a palimpsest landscape, where only remnants of earlier forms can be discerned. Some of the paintings which demonstrate this are expansive oblique vistas of actual regions such as Taranaki and Waikato, while others are imaginary or based on memory. Ultimately, Bourke seeks to blend the relationship between layered mark making and paint washes with the concept of layered physical and cultural patterns in the land. |
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Bobbie Gray - Insignificant Other
2 - 22 April 2022 Central Gallery Insignificant Other brings everyday life into art through magnifying borer ‘galleries’ found in the native timber floors of the artist’s home. Selected sections of chewed-out floorboards are magnified and presented as individual compositions, generating a language all of their own. They could be mistaken for words or symbols of some foreign or ancient language - the hieroglyphs of New Zealand’s heritage homes and buildings. Each work is meticulously finished with a precise colour palette, creating an aesthetic of contemporary design while portraying a feature common only to places of the past. Poised between sculpture and painting, these hand-routed, human-scale engravings are traces of the vast, yet complex realities that lie beneath the surface of our own existence. The works read as abstract paintings, yet the mark making delves beneath the surface, revealing physical depth. The lines left are evidence of life lived, in parallel with our own. Exploring perspective of self, Insignificant Other plays on the concept of sonder: the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as complex as your own. Through this new lens we are able to see ourselves as merely a tiny part of something infinitely bigger, allowing our day to day troubles to fade away. |