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    Hany Armanious: Morphic Resonance Installation view City Gallery Wellington, 2007. Photo: Norm Heke.

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    Hany Armanious Magic Muffin Mountain, 2003. Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney.

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    Hany Armanious: Morphic Resonance Installation view City Gallery Wellington, 2007. Photo: Norm Heke.

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    Hany Armanious: Morphic Resonance Installation view City Gallery Wellington, 2007. Photo: Norm Heke.

Hany Armanious: Morphic Resonance

21 October - 25 November 2006 in the Entire Gallery

For the last twenty years Hany Armanious has been a key figure in Australian art. His formally diverse work is marked by its conflation of opposing values. He draws on images and objects from a divergent pool, morphing and overlaying styles and vocabularies to build playful, evocative and unexpected new configurations. This accumulative short-circuiting of history, influence and association is intentionally far-fetched and often comical. His work draws our attention to the prevalent imperative to seek connection, to notice sameness, to rationalise points of confluence through often bogus means.

While most of the works in this exhibition are recent (2003-07) earlier works highlight material and conceptual connections across Armanious’ practice. These include Teleplastic Emanations (1991-2) an altered found plastic sign that reeks of the glamorous ‘artist’s impressions’ of new aspirational ‘luxury’ apartment developments. This promise of progress is underscored by the reality that gentrification is reliant on the displacement of previous residents. The sign is degraded, its architectural neatness and lush planting are dissolving and bleeding.

Devices for simplifying our life at work and at home have been re-invented; in the work Blindness (2006) what at first appears as simple home work station complete with sexy new Apple Mac, morphs into a low—fi conflation of techno-lust, with the computer being made from a Manilla folder, and the lower shelving area home now to a raft of passed-out and deflated tequila bottles. No ’victory’ worms in sight, but the worm reference continues ‘on-screen’ and with the choice of the ‘apple’ computer; eliciting more complex and slippery associations. The theme extends to Bubble Jet Earth Work (2006) where Armanious employs a bubble machine, fuelled by a mix of bubble fluid and worm castings (nutrient rich worm excretions) to generate a steady stream of ‘documentation’ in the form of residue drawings. Year of the Pig Sty (2007) includes a cluster of works that use home-spun casting techniques to produce mud billiard cues and polyurethane Croc/Birkenstock hybrids.The Danger in Extracting Meaning (2006) features another machine—a snow globe, a souvenir-shorthand depiction of a Victorian well-to-do domestic residence brushed with a flurry of (polystyrene) snow. The interior of the scene reveals a more unsettling miniature tableau, a top-hatted gent rifling through the innards of a prone corpse. Literary and cinematic associations abound, but like the fake snow, refuse to settle or offer a single reading. Armanious’ work provides us with a wealth of clues and prompts but leaves our ‘grey matter’ to arc and spin as we move around the work.

The Sydney-based artist has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. He was included in the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1994 Sydney Biennale and the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale and in 1998, he won the Möet and Chandon Fellowship. In 2001, his major installation work Selflok was showcased at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and in 2002 at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne. In 2006 Armanious was included in Adventures with form in space: 4th Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and this year participated in the group exhibition Surface Wave at Foxy Production in New York. His work has been seen recently in New Zealand in projects at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (Turns in Arraba, 2005) and Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington. This exhibition will be the most comprehensive showing of his work in New Zealand to date.

A new monograph on Armanious’ work will be produced in partnership with IMA, Brisbane.

Public Programmes

Exhibition tours Saturdays and Sundays, 12 noon.

Artist's and Curator's talk
presented by Heather Galbraith.

Principal Sponsor