Media » 2010 Media Releases » Art that Hits the Ground Running - Ready to Roll
Art that Hits the Ground Running - Ready to Roll
31/03/2010New Art Ready to Roll at City Gallery Wellington
Explore new art from around the country at City Gallery Wellington from May 29, as new exhibition Ready to Roll takes off.
The premise is simple – great art being made now by artists with a clear sense of direction and an individual voice. Concentrating on recent work by contemporary artists based in New Zealand, this exhibition features eight artists from Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin; Kushana Bush, Eddie Clemens, Elliot Collins, Matt Hunt, Richard Maloy, Campbell Patterson, Layla Rudneva-Mackay and Zina Swanson.
The ages of the artists range from mid-twenties through to early forties, and while some have been exhibiting for over a decade, for others this is one of their first public gallery exhibitions. This exhibition does not set out to be an all encompassing survey of contemporary New Zealand art, but rather offers visitors the chance to see a range of new work emerging from the four main centres.
Director Paula Savage is excited by the promise shown in this exhibition.
“City Gallery has a long history of showing new work by emerging artists. Ready to Roll is a great opportunity to continue this commitment, as well as to champion the work of more experienced artists in the show—such as Richard Maloy and Matt Hunt—whose work exudes youthful energy and a fascination with the uncanny and the absurd.”
The title infers forward momentum, great promise, latent energy about to be released, and a promise of something exciting and seductive.
Curator Heather Galbraith notes;
“For folk of a certain age the title may bring back memories of sitting on the floor in front of the television on a Saturday night, eagerly awaiting the latest pop hits and their music videos. It is with a similar sense of anticipation that these new and recent works by eight artists are drawn together for Ready to Roll.”
Ready to Roll is a City Gallery Wellington exhibition, curated by Heather Galbraith, Senior Curator/Manager Curatorial Programmes. It runs from 29 May till 12 September, alongside the major survey exhibition John Pule: Hauaga (Arrivals).
Kushana Bush makes intensely detailed gouache works depicting figures undertaking group activities. The exact nature of the activities that these perversely beautiful and tormented figures are engaged in is ambiguous. References to yoga, individual and team sports, are unsettled by an undercurrent of sex and injury. Her style has been described as ‘grotesque sublime’, and is reminiscent of Indo-Persian miniatures and Japanese woodblock prints. Bush will be showing a series of works from the ‘Modern Semaphore’ series. The artist is Dunedin-based.
Eddie Clemens’ sculpture investigates the commodity appeal of consumer products and the way humble objects become markers for life experiences and emotional states. The construction methods in Clemens’ work span re-working hardware or stationery store bought objects (such as Morning Dew (2008) where he augments the common wire-covered clothes dryer, or Captive (2008) where he corrals multiple BIC Captive tethered pens to a surreal end), through to the design and prototyping of objects to simulate consumer items (as demonstrated through the fabrication of Pams’ rose-stencilled tissue boxes in powder-coated steel in The Fallen (2009). Clemens’ has recently completed the Frances Hodgkins’ Fellowship in Dunedin.
Elliot Collins’ text-based paintings whisper secrets and observations that most people and artworks have learnt to keep to themselves. Putting a new twist on diaristic or autobiographical painting, Collins’s works are equal parts brave, hilarious, earnest, melancholic, embarrassing, strident and poetic. Collins is based in Auckland, and for Ready to Roll will produce a site-specific wall painting over 14 metres long.
Matt Hunt’s paintings represent scenes from a total ‘cosmology’ created by the artist. His is an imagination fuelled by the insatiable acquisition of images, from popular culture, art history, the Bible, science fiction cinema and television, and elsewhere. Apocalyptic imagery, utopian creatures and comic book narratives continue to feature in his intensely detailed, maximum-action paintings. Hunt is based in Wellington.
Richard Maloy works across media including photography, sculpture, installation and video. He made his first video project in 1998 as part of his undergraduate studies at Elam where he filmed and photographed himself over eight months climbing in and out of a blue plastic bag. Maloy’s practice has continued to develop along unruly, idiosyncratic, and high-energy lines. For Ready to Roll Maloy will make a large architectural structure out of cardboard and show a collection of video works from a ten year period, before he travels to San Francisco to undertake a Wallace Arts Trust/Fulbright New Zealand supported residency at Headlands Centre for the Arts.
Campbell Patterson is an artist from Auckland, who works mostly alone and with real, staged situations. Much of his work is characterised by an interest in documenting the body’s mental and physical limitations, the results of which are always humorous, sometimes painful, and rarely predictable. Patterson will show a rich selection of over thirty video works not seen before in Wellington.
Layla Rudneva-Mackay makes photographs, informed by simple and acute observations of human behaviour and situations. The characters which inhabit her images are often alone, or interacting with one other in complete trust. The situation is often staged, yet achieves a sense of deep and profound ordinariness. For the first time Rudneva-Mackay will be bringing together works from a range of series, including images exploring portraiture from the ‘Green With Envy’ series. The artist is based in Auckland.
Zina Swanson is a Christchurch-based artist, who has makes drawings and sculptures. In a recent exhibition at The Physics Room she traced the perimeter of the gallery with a chain of pressed daisies, held aloft by glass crutches. The work reveals the artist’s intention to engage her public’s attention with the force of small and very simple things; while creating a cordon not to be crossed, she has typically used the most fragile of materials, deftly dictating the action. Swanson will be showing a new sculptural work and a suite of drawings where flora and fragments of human forms are grafted to create intriguing and fantastic hybrids.
Ready to Roll: Kushana Bush, Eddie Clemens, Elliot Collins, Matt Hunt, Richard Maloy, Campbell Patterson, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Zina Swanson
29 May – 12 September 2010