28 August – 21 September 2024
Opening 28 August at 6pm
This Is Exactly What You Deserve
Gareth Brighton
This Is Exactly What You Deserve will examine the visual language that is implied ubiquitously for us to navigate the accelerating nature of our daily modern life. The installation will juxtapose this modern iconography with materials found directly out our front door and on our streetsides. The pictorial objects for this exhibition are based upon the raw forms of our daily non-linguistic communication. The three-dimensional works – like the image objects, which are scraped from the internet, media, streets and workplaces – are also created from the bric-a-brac of everyday life. Salvaging streetside detritus to be cannibalised and reconstructed into rustic reverence: take the form of asymmetrical shrines and clumsy barricades.
28 August – 21 September 2024
Opening 28 August at 6pm
‘You’ve been here before, Bitch!’, ‘How to Glow Up?’, ‘On the Topic Of Milestones’, ‘ :- ( :- ( :- ( :- ( ‘, ‘Smaller Woman Eating A Big Apple’, ‘A Very Brave Choice’
Steph Arrowsmith and Millie Dunstall
‘You’ve been here before, Bitch!’, ‘How to Glow Up?’, ‘On the Topic Of Milestones’,
‘ :- ( :- ( :- ( :- ( ‘, ‘Smaller Woman Eating A Big Apple’, ‘A Very Brave Choice’, is a collaborative show imagined by Steph and Millie to celebrate their experience as best friends and studio partners. Their practices have grown with their friendship over the course of their four year Fine Arts (Hons) degrees and post- graduate life. They connect in many ways: through experience, conversation, trauma, love, loss and longing. They are both obsessive people in life and practice, and share a deep sadness. They have shared two studios, a home, clothes, secrets, opinions, holidays, cigarettes. They’ve both been independently recognised by strangers as ‘special’ people, who have ‘been here before’ – this being one of their many bizarre commonalities. Because of this, they both believe in their own psychic ability…
‘There’s a madness in her, there’s a madness in me, and together it forms some kind of sanity.’
– Nick Cave, Shattered Ground
Steph is drawn technicolour musicals, pictures in old children’s books, prayer cards, stories of holy apparitions, and holiday photos. Fabricated sets glittering with studio lighting. Beams of coloured sun falling from puffy clouds. Saints radiating light in the sky. Marine animals performing in aquariums. These seemingly disconnected forms of imagery all somehow offer a heavenly picture of the world that is comforting, but eerie and suggestive of something hiding out of the frame – tears leaking through idyllic visions. Working with oil paints, Steph scrubs pigment into fine, transparent cotton, allowing light to pass through and creating paintings with a ghostly presence. Steph is a Fine Arts graduate from Toi Rauwhārangi, Massey University College of Creative Arts (BFA (Hons), 2021) and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau – a recent move with her best friend Millie Dunstall. Recent exhibitions include New Paintings at Sully’s, and Turn, turn, turn at Jhana Millers Gallery.
Millie Dunstall, b. 2000, is an artist from Waihī. Currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau, she is interested in transient spaces, pop culture, social media and the urban environment. Branding, tagging, and promotions that cover living cityscapes – as well as online forums – inspire her processes, informing the symbols and mediums she uses. She has recently become obsessed with the idea of celebrity status and the potentiality of using viral content in her practice. Millie completed a BFA (Hons) in 2021, graduating from Massey University Toi Rauwharangi. Recent exhibitions include Yeah-yeah, oh-woah-oh. Baby, I need to know-oh II at play_station artist run space, and Can there be a second Eden? (For the Trolls) at Meanwhile gallery.
