84 Lower Stuart Street, Dunedin
Opening Wednesday 20th, 5:30pm BYO
This group exhibition offers a view of feminism through many lenses. Exploring themes of play, the body, imagination, gender politics and identity the artists seek to foster participation in useful conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary society.
Artists Involved
Shelley Adamson (Dunedin)
Embodied Model 1 2010
Shelley Adamson works within the interception between craft and digital culture. In Embodied model I knitted gloves are joined and manipulated to form an interpretation of the internet. The result is a non-heirachical structure based upon the notions of decentering, multiplicity and connectivity.
Anne Basquin (Dunedin)
Anne graduated from the Otago School of Art in 2006 and has since spent time travelling exploring India and South East Asia. While travelling Anne honed her documentary photography skills and since coming back to New Zealand has spent time writing poetry and short stories in response to her travels. Her blog is http://www.photoblog.com/Basquin
Emma Chalmers (Stewart Island)
Shoes for the wives of the unemployed 2009
Emma recently graduated from Otago Polytechnic School of Art and is now a practicing artist, living on Stewart Island. When not out wandering through native bush passage ways she spends a great deal of my time creating ‘mindscape paintings’ in my tree-hut studio, assorting and reinventing drips and drabs of daily routines, experiences and conversations in paint. Previously she has explored maternal and domestic roles in my work. Engaging with traditional and agricultural ideology to examine the way expected and accepted gender-roles construct a certain psychology in rural New Zealand communities. Drawing on her new experiences of integration and acceptance in a tight-knit community, Emma's works gather together the intrinsic relationships experienced between people and place in rural, domestic and isolated environments.
Emma says "A quote I read recently, which sums up nicely my current painterly investigations; Freedom is the sum of the tiny spaces between hair. To me this line suggests the kind of transcendental journey that paint can take us on. These journeys are varied, powerful and uncertain and can be found in spaces both vast and minute, psychological and real, public and private. Its how, who, what and where we weave these tiny spaces together which interests me and my work at present."
Briar Commins (Dunedin)
Best Before, 2009
Briar's work investigates the lived experience of being fat. Her potent imagery represents both the psychological pressures of consumer society and the joy of the physical body. By selecting unconventional materials for her figurative works, she is able to convey a very powerful message to the viewer with eloquence and insight. Briar Comins is an emerging artist who lives with her family in Dunedin. Briar's work is currently on show at ROCDA gallery as part of the Women on Form exhibition.
Elspeth Fougere (Auckland)
We are a community of cells. 2009
Elspeth’s work examines histories, both personal and cultural in relationship to our physical bodies through series of activations and performances of her crocheted ‘cells’ These cells speak of the embodied histories that we carry through the body. In the retelling, we become conscious of where we have been, what we are about, who we are, what is natural within us... and from touching that base of knowing, instinctively perceiving how we can move ahead, creatively, consciously, harmoniously, with the rest of the natural world. She is currently using these activations to investigate gender binaries and intersex characteristics.
Desi Liversage (Dunedin)
Desi Liversage is a textile artist who can't make pretty things while the world is messy. This work is the beginning of a series of work entitled Stitched up: designer vaginas.
Rohana Weaver (Wellington)
Rohana's works play with notions of performance, gender roles and social politics both in the human and animal worlds. Using gendered materials associated with stage performance, burlesque and drag acts, Rohana creates threatening yet playful creatures such as Medusa, a jellyfish made of feathers. Taking inspiration from her recent time in Sicily working on the Theatro del Fuoco (Theatre of Fire), Rohana draws parallels between animal behavior, disguise and patterning and human methods of the performance of gender roles.
Concerned with the place of animals with in our society as well as social politics, Rohana questions the binary notion of 'us' and 'them', both for gender and species.
We Are Optimistic (Dunedin)
The planning station, the second stage in the ongoing project Patriarchy Free Zone, will be open for participation throughout the exhibition. Read more about We Are Optimistic here.
