Space M
Samuel Montgomery and Daniel Ellison
What’s the Point
25 Nov – 12 Dec 2020


RM presents What’s the Point, a show of new work by Daniel Ellison and Samuel Montgomery that touches on a variety of issues contributing to what has so far been 2020. Reality and make-believe provided us with a monolithic pile of stories to mull over throughout the year, and as we watched all the bad guys and mediocre guys play them out, we became closer. While people around the world were thrown into various degrees of lockdown, us privileged folk—although physically restricted—took to the internet to experience the world we were missing out on and expand our minds. Aside from giving us cancer or whatever, 5G and social media still allowed us all to connect and share our experiences. Unfortunately, it also gave birth to some pretty frightening theories and events, revitalised old prejudices, and even turned some weirdos into celebrities. But the attention economy doesn’t discriminate, and neither should we. In What’s the Point, Ellison and Montogomery both present work made over the past few months as they both tried to maintain their practices and have a semi-normal life while navigating the various extremities taking place both here and overseas.

Space R
Matt Ritani
All Roads
25 Nov – 12 Dec 2020

It feels like flying. Arcs, bumps, and the hills curl up. A parallel to the nape of your neck. Lines pour like water. Rumbles and cracks. They are everywhere we can get to. The trip is always out of time. 7.40 pm dark greens and the humidity of unbroken rain. Sometimes slow and dusty. Sometimes you think you could get crushed at any moment. A red zig-zag queries your kupu. How did we get here? Why is it like this? She walked all along Te Ika-a-Māui. We would marvel at their beauty if they weren’t so ordinary these colossal leaf vein systems. If you imagine the city, gaze east-west and see it rise and fall. Covering something doesn’t stop it from being there like painting over a painting. Our basements are cavities and our piles are not perfect cylinders. The foundation beams aren’t square. Our children, the archaeologists, will one day dig them up. They will stare at the mottled edges and wonder why we tied whenua to our intentions.

An essay by Tyson Schmidt, Roads are big business accompanies this exhibition and can be found here.

Julia Reynolds
Frances Duncan
At The Horizon: Burdens and Possibilities of the Mother Tongue
Interactive Audio Visual Installation
4-21 November 2020

The installation seeks to traverse across three generations of women from a personal experience of this artist living in New Zealand; my mother, myself and my daughter as a mode of thinking about language as inheritance, and as systems of construction of the female, (withheld and at flux).

The site is set up as a ‘hot-desk’ within an already established office and working environment. Users are asked inhabit this space to engage with the 9 non-linear chapters which are inspired by Maya Deren’s essay, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946).

The user chooses chapters through an anagram template, suggesting that the linearity of information is of no-consequence to meaning, and instead there is a cross-over connectivity of themes through the anagram to suggest alternative systems of comprehension. The structure engages with the understanding of Mother-Daughter as a crossover of reference and identity.

Grant Priest
All by the side of the runway where it hums

4-21 November 2020

Kohuora Auckland South Corrections Facility is a prison complex operated by Serco, a multinational corporation based in the UK. Serco takes on contracts from governments around the world to operate public services on their behalf. The services they operate range from prisons to hospitals, border patrols to immigration. This complex is located next to Matukutūreia, a quarried out Pā site in Wiri, South Auckland, once home to a thriving Māori community with some of Aotearoa’s earliest remaining examples of Māori agriculture.   This initial film work is the beginning of a project exploring the relation between this land, the prison complex and my presence in this space. It approaches the problematic descriptive nature of film. It is intended as a documentation of time spent with this space; finding the lay of the land, familiarising myself with the environment and the wider structural and everyday contexts within which this facility exists.

Krystina Kaza
It’s a fine line

4-21 November 2020

This exhibition makes use of a line that travels around the gallery, becoming an organising device that  supports work and integrates it with the architecture. The resulting interior environment sits somewhere between the Weiner Werkstatte’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art,’ which sought to create a unified aesthetic across a designed environment, and Adolf Loos’ and the Bauhaus’ rejection of the Werkstatte’s decorative tendencies in favour of a stringent functionalism. The line here is functional: it supports works physically and unifies different types of work.  It is not, however, immune to decorative flights of fancy: the decorative nature of the line transforms the ‘white cube’ of the gallery, softening it and giving it a slightly more domestic feel.  .

The idea of an interior ‘baseline’ goes back to Roman times, where painted or moulded lines were used to frame frescoes, and to create faux architectural details. The line in this exhibition will play off of traditional interior devices such as wainscoting and picture rails, which were functional, but which were also used to organise interior spaces,  connecting them to each other and creating visual focal points.  

Some of the work in It’s a Fine Line begins with imagery of historical abstract and decorative designs, while some of it begins with photographs taken in daily life – often while on walks or commuting to work. The combination of photographs and historical imagery kicks off a drawing process through which the work develops.  Some of these drawings and photos are included in the exhibition to create a context for the work, and to open it up to new interpretations.  

14 Oct – 31 October 2020

Hold is an exhibition of moving and still image works by Deanna Dowling. An extension of her ongoing research into the architectural design and lifespans of domestic dwellings, this body of work explores the architectural detail of a small wooden joint peg collected from a demolished house in Tokyo.

Central to the installation are two moving image works that consider the material from different positions. Using research material collected while in Tokyo and micro CT scanning, the imagery slices through the layers of the wood to reveal cell structure, species and microorganisms present. Hold gestures to the possibility of revealing the potential movements of this small object before it was used in the construction of a house; a prompt to reconsider the relationships between materiality scale, form, historical facts and anecdotes attached to found objects.

Matā
14 Oct – 31 October 2020

Matā can be used to sever the umbilical cord upon birth, and is buried with the whenua in a place that becomes one’s tūrangawaewae. With this in mind, Taupaki collects minerals and objects from places, or in reference to places, that are significant to her identity as a wahine Māori. Creating hammocks, beds, and appropriate display stands, Taupaki acts as kaitiaki for these non human beings, and allows them to take shape of their own accord. Ties to the whenua as both placenta and land are brought forth through reciprocal nurturing and memory.

Sophie Bannan 
Cyan ides
24 September to 10 October 2020

Gelignite admits the fire
Vein obsequies scabs
Kōtukutuku admits the gorse

track the common scrubby associated –

Water drives those two hills
Deep gully receives the milk

go up the suitably-inscribed fine to moderate grained –

Sluice scabs the layers
Cyanide scrutineers
Water wrenches
Continuance drives the swines

persuade the auriferous sound bounded –

Māwheranui locates the body
High hedge locates the moonlight
Grey River receives continuance

run the cool flattened –

Mullock steams the bush gullies
Mists pace the shapes
Bush flat persuades the vein

run the encompassing driven –

Timber inspects the firewood
Quartz reef learns the river

relax down grassed bounded wet –

Kāmahi receives the water
Gold approaches

split the more open cool driven –

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Sophie Bannan (b. 1989, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist and writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her research is multi-modal, working across image and object making, writing, publishing and curating.

Space R
3 Sept – 19 Sept 2020
For us, disavowed materials form our local habitats and exist as a byproduct of human activity. 

The practice of Mining is to appropriate oneself with otherwise unclaimed resources and collect this free basic material, The Twenty-First Century Raw Material. This abundance of seemingly infinite materia affords our process welcoming experimentation and failure. We mine what we value.

“Technological Disobedience” the Cuban’s systematic disrespect towards complexity, closeness, and exclusionary characteristics of industrial objects’ logics – Ernesto Oroza. “Worker, build your own machinery” Che Guevara Insisted in a 1961 speech as the Republic of Cuba faces scarcity of resources due to the country’s economical and political crisis. Cuban workers were to strategize a self-production, repair, reuse and repurpose. A re-appropriation of technologies took place and trickled down from an industrial necessity to domestic commonplace.

In the 21st century, technology is evermore airtight, closed to the user, rejecting repair and facilitating disposal. Intervene on the object’s authority by repairing it, capitalizing on planned obsolescence becoming a co-designer to the open-source ecosystem. 

Home is a laboratory.

-OpenCo