Melissa Gilbert
CITE YOUR REFERENCES // MY UNCLE SAID SO
23 November – 17 December 2022

The western mode of “citing your references” within academia delegitimizes cultural modes of knowledge sharing. Cite your references // My uncle said so, depicts the jigsaw puzzle of discovering history from alternative sources and avenues. When digging for content on a colonised culture, historical literature is written with a lens that cannot capture it in it’s entirely and nuance. Due to the lack of useful published sources, there is a need to seek other avenues.

The audio and visual footage in the moving image was captured on an iPhone. The medium with which the content is captured doesn’t matter, merely recording and archiving the stories are the priority. Throughout the year of making this work, I have recorded the unexpected conversations containing wells of knowledge over coffee, ciggie breaks, 4am kick on’s, car rides etc. The visual element to the work is grainy and imperfect, focusing on recording the mundane places of learning and ways of being.

The first recorded conversation is about the pre-colonial women’s boxing matches had in Tonga. The second recording is about the seven types of ofa (love) recognised in Tongan culture.

Zoe Thompson-Moore
OPEN FIELD
23 November – 17 December 2022

A gathering together of pieces –

– Breadline – Making shift – Articulated kale – The ties that bind – Spell it out – Bees boiling – Woolgathering – Idle chit chat – Enclosure of the hand – A lump of something wound about – The world turned upside down –

Nature’s Fresh bread bags, plied – Sacks from neighbourhood coffee roastery, smocked – Thread salvaged from potato sacks – My favourite garden fork – Walking Stick Kale grown in various neighbourhood gardens – Seed and seed pods saved from Walking Stick Kale – Used plant pot –Nails salvaged from rotting pallets once used to hold motherload-motherlode (2017-2018) compost heap – Palings from our back fence – Rotted sack exhumed from the neighbourhood compost heap –Last summer’s plant ties cut from old t shirts – Our neighbour’s washing line – Lump of bread made with sourdough mother used during The making of bread, etc. (2019-2020) – Forgotten potato, remembered

piecewerk perambulates the bounds, an emergent vocabulary

Isabella Loudon
SELF SEEKER
19 October – 12 November 2022

A new series of sculptures.

Recent exhibitions include chimera, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, 2021; Morph, Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland, 2021; wastelands, Papatūnga, Auckland, 2020; Unravelled, City Gallery Te Whare toi, Wellington, 2019; Labyrinth, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 2019.

Katrina Beekhuis
EXUVIAE
19 October – 12 November 2022

exuviae

cast or sloughed skin of an insect; husk, shell, exoskeleton.

…

An image is made by sticking washi tape to a sheet of newsprint. The tape is cut in the grid-like format of a calendar, attached to the windowpane and left for several months. Removing the tape reveals a sun-bleached image ghosted onto the light-sensitive surface.

What does it mean to gather or deplete over time, to exist in slightness or impermanence? This exhibition comprises sculptures and a drawing and employs opacity as both a material condition and conceptual approach–an obscuring at odds with a world of hyper-visibility propelled by neoliberalism’s rationale of quantifying, reducing and knowing.

Rather than a hollowing out, this exhibition seeks aggregation, time and opacity to open up, destabilise and unstick the stuck down.

Arapeta Ashton
HOME SWEET HOME
14 September – 8 October 2022

Home Sweet Home is an queer ontological experiment by multidisciplinary creative Arapeta that pulls together a plush collection of deeply considered movements, experiences and koorero, together into a new landscape in which dance, song, koorero, kapa haka and whatu kaakahu all come together to generate wholly new environment, with a foundational purpose of pure enjoyment. Like seafoam, churned up from the colliding of waves and tides, the birth of an entirely fresh experience can build outwards towards new discoveries.

Text by Divyaa Kumar. Read the full essay.

Abigail Aroha Jensen
R. BOUDOIR
14 September – 8 October 2022

Black mould tracing kōwhaiwhai, pūngāwere miro the silk threads that dress her chandelier. She belongs to an ephemeral estate. She re-imagines ngā taonga tuku iho, catching threads of tukutuku in order to ascend the pou-tame-hine. It’s whakaahuatanga. – transformation in the face of adversity, towards whakakotahitanga – reintegration of time and space. Romantic she is. It’s all very decadent. Sickly sweet.

Please join us to mark the opening of 𝓡.𝓑𝓸𝓾𝓭𝓸𝓲𝓻 this Wednesday 14th September. Une memento o te Whare. Mā te wā, taku Aroha x

Angel C. Fitzgerald and Zac Small
BETWEEN TWO ENDS
10 August – 3 September

between two ends is a new collaborative exhibition by Angel C Fitzgerald and Zac Small opening August 10th at 6pm at RM Gallery. The show comprises sculptural, photographic and video elements with a two channel film starring Bebe Gall.

Angel C Fitzgerald is an artist, writer and filmmaker living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Through their work they seek to articulate personal subject matter, with recent films focusing on love, heartbreak, friendship and transition. They’re invested in the emotional dimensions of cinema with a focus on poetic and visual storytelling. Their work has been exhibited at Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; play_station, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Window Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; Te Tuhi, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; and Blue Oyster Project Space, Ōtepoti Dunedin. Angel is also a facilitator at play_station space.

Zac Small is an artist currently living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Within his largely sculpture-based practice he explores material systems and how they speak to the world around them. Through the detailed manipulation of surfaces, objects and spaces he questions ideas of authenticity, meaning and relation.

Bebe Gall is a textile designer living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her material research focuses on the lost and complex relationships between our bodies, material and nature, through producing and manipulating materials that invoke conversation and physical interaction between beings.

Poster design by Aleisha Marinkovich

Ashleigh Tuck
UNBEARABLY CLOSE
10 August – 3 September 2022

Unbearably Close is an exploration of breath, materiality and the natural/unnatural divide. An invitation to engage with the man-made, the soft, puckered and malleable. Forms in flux, pushing and folding against the walls, competing for space, then, giving over to gravity and sleep. Human determination despite our fleshy fragility might be recognised in this unnatural and imperishable plastic gaining stretch marks and split seam orifices. It’s close but also “other”.

Giulio Laura
A CONSUMER’S GUIDE, POWERED BY MATERIAL POLITICS
7 July – 30 July 2022

Consumption¹ is the utilisation of any object in whatever form they may be. A counter gesture against disposal, rather than throwing something out at the point of obsolescence. Problem solving as a way to rejuvenate objects if broken, useless or out of date. Mending them, Mining² them for their parts, recontextualising them to make something new. Appropriating discarded materials as a method of playful cultural Consumption neglects the idea of ownership in favour of reparation. An attempt at reframing what Consuming means, re-appropriating the power of depletion. Consumption is as a counter gesture against disposability.

¹ Consumption: The utilisation of objects to their full material possibility, disregarding the idea of obsolescence.

² Mine/mining: The collection/extraction of collectable waste.

Iann An
CIVIC BALM
7 July – 30 July 2022

What lies beneath the surface of our civilised skins, metaphorically and physically? Civic Balm investigates various states or capacities of a body while seeking to dismantle socially constructed notions of a ‘healthy’, ‘able’ and ‘perfect’ body. The individual pieces can be seen as fragmented, monstrous, injured, ugly, strange, and perhaps even frightening, but as intimidation fades it may be replaced with familiarisation, and bit by bit, we may recognise death as a friend.