Lily Worrall
SHE FEEDS THE BIRDS

5 – 29 JULY 2023

She’s feeding
She fed
She will feed
she feeds the birds, imagines a dystopian future where seagulls have usurped the human dominion, reigning over their new subjects, who are divided in set and rigid classes. In this short fiction, Lily Worrall combines the traditions of NZ Goth with the speculative potentials of science fiction, coining what she terms, a ‘glum sci-fi’. A gesture of genre-bending that looks forward to haunt backwards and vice-versa.

The film follows an unnamed feeder, tasked with different districts in Tāmaki where she is to feed the birds. While on the job, a minor discretion sees her abandon the role; fleeing into the deserted city centre to take refuge. Here, she comes across the former havens and grottos of the flâneuse, a spectre of the past who once botanized the asphalt. Glimmers of these former dreamscapes collapse into the nightmarish horizons of a new world. Where laneways, the ruins of a fashion house and the site of a former arcade-cum-theatre; atrophy and congeal.

35 mm B&W Photographs, Digital Projection, Duration: 7 min

Writer + Director – Lily Worrall
Starring – Bonnie Harvey + Amanda Lane
Photography – Ardit Hoxha + Lily Worrall
Soundtrack – Peter Worrall + Lily Worrall
Editor – Lily Worrall

Lily Worrall is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, whose practice explores cinema, the family archive, digital/found materials and feminist film theory.

lilyworrall.com

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Bena Jackson
CASTLE MALL
31 May – 24 June 2023

Anything can become a car park—terms and conditions sign, a swampy puddle, barely a fence. Even now, the gravel lots litter the city. Time will tell which are permanent and which are placeholders.

I walk the same route each day, seeing the supermarket trolleys make their way up the street with the free sofa and a broken bottle. Last week I noticed someone clearing out the carport that had become a dumping ground for street debris. The shattered flatscreen was swept away, the recovered space filled with new intent.

We still call the renovated pedestrian mall hack circle. The name stuck long after the undesirable youth element had been removed—replaced by a paved area with some seating, standard street lighting and bins for litter and recycling. A turret and a bollard.

—

Bena Jackson lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where she is finishing her Masters of Fine Art at Massey University. Bena lived in Ōtautahi Christchurch from 2006-2014. Recent exhibitions include Camera phone, at play_station (2021) and Bound in secret knots with Teresa Collins at Enjoy (2021).

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Emme Orbach
AN EPOCH IN STONE
31 May – 24 June 2023

“Artistic form emerges out of a chaos which seeks its own shape. The role of the artist or poet is not to impose a pre-existing form upon senseless matter but to allow the material to find its own sense. What is primary is what is given, a chaos of meanings which demands assistance in order to come-into-form. The poet is thus the mediator or facilitator who lends a hand to the process of formation, not the demiurge who creates ex nihilo.”

Levine. S. 2004. Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

An epoch in stone explores the history of local minerals and stones, from geological creation through to industrialisation. Emme Orbach investigates elements and resources native to Aotearoa from research collected in 2022-23 from site visits across the North Island.

The exhibition explores themes of impermanence and the passage of time. The artist is curious about the awe inspiring yet existential predicament of comprehending nature that surpasses the human lifetime – of minerals that span thousands of years in creation.

An epoch in stone examines the agency of organic and inorganic forms. Orbach’s sculpture is constituted of pine wood, pumice stones and copper sulphate crystals, a topographical installation that evolves throughout the duration of exhibition. The artist plays the role of facilitator in poiesis, a balancing act of coaxing material into being, yet rescinding control to see what occurs.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Alison Leauanae, Gary Silipa, Linda Va’aelua and Siliga David Setoga
WE WERE HERE
26 April – 20 May 2023

Gentrification has and will continue to change the face of our city, whether for better or worse.

‘Samoa House Lane’, speaks of a people’s presence from times past. The heart of first-generation migrants. A thriving Urban Polynesian village for church, shops, markets, and gatherings.

We Were Here is part nostalgia, part commemoration.

What happens when the colour and heart is steadily pushed out to the furthest bounds of the city?

Alison Leauanae, Gary Silipa, Linda Va’aelua and Siliga David Setoga, all second-generation Samoan migrants to Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, explore the importance of K’Rd and its surroundings as their peoples first landing place.

Connah Podmore
THE ROOM WHERE YOUR BROTHER WAS BORN
26 April – 20 May 2023

“The homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.”
Alcott, Louisa M. 2013. Little Woman. Sovereign. 425.

The room where your brother was born is an exhibition spanning drawing, weaving and photography by Connah Podmore.

Inspired by the memory of her family’s first home, this exhibition reflects on motherhood and domestic work. True to the act of caregiving, Podmore’s method of working is repetitive and generous; expansive, yet very ordinary. Electrical sockets, walls and curtains are all built through time consuming processes of drawing and erasure, or weaving by hand.

Central to this exhibition is a personal search for meaning and support through the work of authors whose writing likewise explores the roles of artist and mother, and gently challenges perceptions around where importance is placed and how self-worth is measured.

Sophie Sutherland
HOT WHEELS 3000
22 March – 15 April 2023

Hot Wheels 3000 invites participants to race an option of three remote control cars in Samoa House Lane, adjacent to RM gallery. This project is a sculptural and interaction conception of competition, expectation, play, and comradery. So, do you think you can drive?

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Juliana Durán
TROPICAL DEBRIS
22 March – 15 April 2023

The tropics have long been associated with exoticism, lushness, and excess. As Nancy Leys Stepan shows in Picturing Tropical Nature, “The ‘tropical’ came to constitute more than a geographical concept; it signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world, with which it contrasted and which it helped constitute”.

Tropicality, although a concept that first appeared with colonisation, is deeply rooted in pre-hispanic ways of life, where resourcefulness and creativity were essential for survival. By embracing these values, these works pay homage to the real legacy of the tropics. Being exotic is not a quality of the object, person, or place itself, but rather a feeling or reaction that the observer experiences temporarily.

Tropical Debris is not only a collection of upcycled objects but also a statement of identity and a challenge to cultural assumptions and stereotypes associated with the concept of tropical. By giving new life to discarded materials, the pieces defy the absurdity of a society that often prioritizes waste over resourcefulness.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Aliyah Winter
OCTOBER 1935
22 March – 15 April 2023

October 1935 takes its name from the first poem of the series Six Memorials by Ursula Bethell. These poems are a mourning for the woman Bethell called her consort, Effie Pollen, written on anniversaries of Pollen’s passing. While they lived together for 30 years, they were careful about their relationship in public.

October 1935 enacts a private ritual of mourning that works with and against language, and the demands of intelligibility. Taking up a constellation of references, the work plays with obscurity as a poetic strategy and a kind of shield, embracing Tiffany Page’s concept of a vulnerable methodology. Page writes in relation to the ethics of telling the stories of others: “as well as exposing the fragility of knowledge assembly, a vulnerable methodology might be closely positioned with questioning what is known, and what might come from an opening in not knowing.”

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Hana Carpenter, Chantel Matthews, Tony Guo and Erich Roebeck
THE DINNER PARTY
22 February – 11 March 2023

Dinner parties can bring the unlikeliest of guests together from the awkward first “hello” bonding over the mundane to discreetly exiting stage left. Whether they are our beloved ones or those we no longer speak to, ‘the dinner party’ offers an unexpected yet intimate gathering of works that seek connection, love and acceptance. From figurative painting and abstraction to interaction and installation, although these artists are diverse in medium and conceptual thought, they all advocate community by embracing the multiples through a space of convivial sharing and unity.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Josh Carlier
ENTANGLEMENT
22 February – 11 March 2023

Entanglement (2022) is an exploration of the extended self, and the objects that appear within this space, be it sound, light, thought or sensation. The project primarily engages with water, the various forms it takes, and the places it resides. It began as an investigation into the sources of Auckland’s water supply, before shifting into a more general inquiry into the state of the environments surrounding Auckland’s reservoirs. Entanglement examines human interventions and their ecological impacts, and reflects on how we are all physically involved as consumers of water produced in the Hunua and Waitakere ranges.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha