// Thurs. 21/04 – Sat. 07/05, 2011

//Opening 6pm Wed. 20/04

Timber Trophy

// Thurs. 31/03 – Sat. 16/04, 2011

// Opening 6pm Wed. 30/03

Timber Trophy brings together the work of Kirstin
Carlin and Carina Brand. The show is concerned with unabashedly placing high and low forms of culture and value side by side in an attempt to playfully tease out contradictions of history and culture. Both artists employ elements of kitsch and contemplate the irony of taste. Juxtaposing good with bad and amateur with professional they investigate the tropes of representation that make up art and object culture. There is a sense of longing that plays out in the consideration of a European tradition that is undermined by ‘New World’ aesthetics and reflects what these might be?

Kirstin reinterprets Dutch and Flemish still life painting. The polite imagery and well torn territory of the still life painting genre is torn apart in these new paintings which are made up of impasto shiny paint threatening to dissolve into murkiness. The lithographs- part postcard part collage cut and paste cultural clichés in a labour intensive process.

Carina’s objects look back and survey the range of ‘goods’ taken as trophies or what’s left behind as relic. All works are cast or copied from objects found in opportunity shops and hobbyist/amateur WebPages. The work engages in a dialogue of the politics of the ‘Global Aesthetic’ and a continued culture of collecting.

Folded Room: Paths Crossing

// Thurs. 10/03 – Sat. 26/02, 2011
// Opening 6pm Wed. 09/03

The more I kept finding myself returning to these pencil-gridded kaleidoscopic abstract works, the more I realised they speak to the battleground of edges between things. The way in life we cannot adopt one system without having to concede it is failing as much as succeeding… While embracing a package of structures from modernism, they constantly fight the idea of some forward momentum and harmony, to suggest a constant shifting forward and back; of things being built up, build down, built over and built around. On the surface they have the appearance of a fiendishly complicated modular board or computer game, but in their thick web of abstracted influences there’s a battle going on between different cultures, aesthetics, and hierarchies. One minute I’m thinking of the gridded battleground spaces of Uccello’s San Romano, the next I’m feeding the watercolours of Frances Hodgkins through cubism enroute to the drips of the abstract expressi onists and cubes of the geometric abstractionist. Then I’m unfolding it all as boxes in Wellington with Richard Reddaway. The carefully trained drips of watercolour course along side the channels created by the vertical pencil marks, like blood spilt from battles between design and art, and one moment in cultural history and another.

– Mark Amery

// Opening 6pm, Wed. 1/12

// Thurs. 2/12 – Sat. 18/12 2010

Three artists looking at social issues embedded within three very different locations.

Eun Hyung Kim’s videos involve interviews with North Korean refugees living in the Netherlands, as well a border crossing from China into North Korea; Kota Takeuchi takes to the Japanese hometown ‘tradition’ with a baseball bat; and Emilija Skarnulyte’s drawings reflect on the lives of migrant workers in so-called ‘3D’ jobs (dangerous, difficult, demanding work.)

Blind Pig

// Thurs. 21/10 – Sat. 6/11 2010
// Opening night performance from 6.30pm

• All welcome. Refreshments provided.
• Adam Smith reckons “The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to those who want to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it”.
• Karl Marx would add (indirectly quoted) “relations between people take form as the properties of things”.
• Of properties ascribed to things, value, as determination of utility or worth, is an attribute expressed in multiple forms.
• Diamonds and water etc.
• Within a specific historical context value can be mapped on a scale of ascendancy. This map, in turn, can be seen as an objectified schema for social relations.
• Capitalism and alienation etc.
• If a thing’s value is uncertain, social signification in relation to the thing is likewise.
• Within this uncertainty an opportunity exists to re-map both the value of things and their prefiguration.
• It is necessary to inhabit a thing in order for its potential as alternative prefiguration to be explored.
• The gallery provides a context within which, through the presentation of an action and things, I seek to explore an alternative prefiguration of value.

A Garden for Norman

// Thurs. 11/11 – Sat. 27/11 2010

Did you know that RM’s current space used to be a restaurant, and that its walls still have the telltale veneer of fat on them? Or that it was built for a man named Norman?

Inspired by past inhabitants of Tuatara house, Kirsten Dryburgh will draw the building’s history out over a two-week laboratory, in which experiments and gestures are performed/created to summon the ghosts of Tuatara past. Such processes will involve materials like concrete, rocks and plants – in reference to the Chelsea physics garden where apothecaries honed and preserved their knowledge of plant science. These materials will be used to animate the space and create a lab of living history and things.

Dryburgh is an artist who lets materials, living or inanimate, tell their own stories. She has a specific interest in natural phenomena and environmental science. As a result, she is also keen on the relationships between the natural world, society, technology and science. She often employs a research-based, investigative approach in her art practice, which then enables her to intuit new relationships and narratives.

Lethargy Lost

 
// Thurs. 29/9 – Sat. 16/10 2010

In languages that derive from Latin, ‘compassion’ means we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathise with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, ‘pity’ , connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. ‘to take pity on a woman’ means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

– from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

[portfolio_slideshow]

// Thurs. 29/9 – Sat. 16/10 2010

Sam will exhibit a number of new works completed while studying as a guest at the Dusseldorf Art Academy between 2009 and 2010.

I know very well…
but all the same

// Thurs. 19/08 – Sat. 04/09 2010

‘It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling.’

– from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Akiko Diegel

Gabrielle Amodeo

Jill Sorensen

Nell Nutsford

Ryuzo Nishida

Matt Molloy

Rabdeep Singh

Part One:
Thursday 29 July to Saturday 31 July
Normal gallery hours

Part Two:
Thursday 5 August to Saturday 7 August
Normal gallery hours, including public artists discussion Saturday 7 August, 1.00pm.

Part Three:
Thursday 12 August to Saturday 14 August
Normal gallery hours, including closing event Wednesday 11 August 6.00pm.