An east Auckland art gallery is staging six new exhibitions featuring work by a diverse range of local and overseas creatives.
Te Tuhi communications and programme co-ordinator Alena Kavka says they opened at the Pakuranga gallery on August 19.
The exhibitions “reflect in different ways our evolving human perception in the face of ongoing rhythms of distance and migration and their intersection with new and old technologies” through the work of artists from New Zealand, China and Taiwan.
The first, coming to Te Tuhi from an international exhibition in Venice, Italy, is Logic Paralyzes the Heart, a multi-media installation by acclaimed American artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.
It comprises wallpaper featuring the faces of “missing people” that have been generated by artificial intelligence with a video narrated by a 61-year-old “cyborg” reflecting on her life.
“In an adjacent gallery, we will be showing REM Sleep, a three-channel video by Taiwanese artist Chia-En Jao,” Kavka says.
“It examines the plight of migrant workers in Taiwan through the accounts of 18 invited speakers, each of whom recount one of their dreams in front of the camera.”
Also, New Zealand Pakeha-Tongan artists Benjamin Work and Harrison Freeth are presenting their collaborative work, entitled Bodies of Water, Made of Land.
It references the interconnections between body and land through the concepts of Va (relational space) and Ta (time).
“Exploring their shared Palangi and Tongan heritage through overlapping motifs drawn from both cultures, the artists conceive of the present as a fluid entity crossed over by time and space,” Kavka says.
“Recognising we walk forward through the past and backwards into the future.”
In the gallery’s speaker space, Christchurch artist Noel Meek and Chinese artist Yan Jun present their work Mirror Three.
It’s part of a continuing series of collaborative sound and video works.
The duo’s creation sonically explores two lived environments a world apart, the post-earthquake Christchurch red-zone and Beijing’s intensely urban and anthropocentric environment.
Kavka says the gallery’s project wall welcomes New Zealand artist and designer Catherine Griffiths.
Her large-scale painted work is based on a typographic set for 26 letters, 10 numbers and punctuation, in which the weight of the letterforms has been increased to the point of “un-recognisability”.
Lastly, outside the gallery, on its billboards on Reeves Road, Wellington-based artist Sean Waugh will present peripheral vision, a site-specific work informed by his time spent working in the area around Te Tuhi.
Using a technique called “focus stacking”, he’s built images collected from the gallery’s surroundings into an abstracted environment that reflects, and grounds itself, in the location they’re presented in.
The work will also be presented on the billboards at Parnell Station in central Auckland.
