In the Sixties and Seventies Guy Ngan was a public art insider, an artist working with architectural practices and the Ministry of Works.
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Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson has a talent for excavating aberrant examples, for taking sidebar stories and making them into the main event.
A trawl through the archive of artist Bruce Barber.
Alex Monteith’s work combines the formal and the relational, engaging with communities of practice and creating events engineered for the camera.
Breuning makes videos and photographs; he is master of the constructed scenario. Descriptions of his work catalogue props – paring knives scotch-taped to fake-blooded hands, woolly hats, trainers, ski pants…
The story of artist-run galleries begins, at least for my generation of emergent, post-pubescent, pre-mortgaged Auckland artists, with Teststrip.
Arcadia draws on computer game aesthetics and the models of conflict and competition they both participate in and help to foster.
I first started thinking of paint as a weighty physical material at the end of my first year at Art School. In preparation for the final exhibitions, everything received a frenzied application of white acrylic to banish the year’s smears and splatters and gallerise the institution.
I’ve been having trouble with my eyes lately. Nothing serious, but experts have been peering through my lenses, systematically dazzling me. It all started with dark spots – tiny moving shadows flicking across the white page, the glowing screen, the blue sky.
Start with the feeling of walking into the gallery and being hit by something huge, an interior landscape, a petrochemical wonderland. The huge twining mass of intricately draped and interlinked polystyrene is soft, almost glowing under the gallery lights.
Auckland artist Jae Hoon Lee creates composite images: stitched-together landscapes, strangely flayed portraits and kaleidoscopic nature studies. His digital prints are seamless, but oddly disjointed. Lee is an analytical cubist with Photoshop skills.
As well as furnishing us with family portraits and a billion framed sunsets, the camera has offered new horizons and new tyrannies. Our bodies and imaginations are squeezed through the shutter, dreaming in Technicolor and diarising in wobbly Handy-cam.
Fleury ambiguously appropriates the stuff of the fashionable lifestyle – paintings, carpets, shoes, hemlines; incorporating her passion for muscle cars and the space programme in installation, sound work, and video.