CURATOR Abby Cunnane ARTISTS James Francis, Amy Howden-Chapman, Annette O'Sullivan, Maria Walls, Adam Willetts

Four projects offer different ways to think about places: what places are, how they are imagined, and how they come to be through writing and conversation.

Adam Willetts and Maria Walls are both from Christchurch, whose art scene has been disrupted by the 2011 Canterbury earthquakes. Willetts’s ceramic sculptures suggest otherworldly flora, fauna, and geology, but also the crude, pixelated graphics of old 2D video games and the awkward polygonal environments of modern 3D games. Walls presents a large photographic installation, Host, featuring images surreptitiously photographed from another exhibition context, and a small-press publication, Offers, inserted into the exhibition brochure. Both works were created from appropriated images. Walls hosts displaced images, accommodating them in new ways.

Currently based in LA, Wellington artist Amy Howden-Chapman presents documentation of a series of performances that considered the effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis on European ports, and on the cities of Melbourne, Los Angeles, and Wellington. It becomes an account of the places the performances were presented.

Copywriter James Francis and typographer Annette O’Sullivan, also from Wellington, show posters. Francis’s poetic copy about wooden type—which was popularised during the early days of advertising—was hand printed by O’Sullivan using wooden type. These works evoke those old newspaper headlines through which people once first encountered crises.