Tension, the new and the old, past and future, raw and cooked. Pressure builds. Cracks appear, urging new ways of thinking: a seismic shift.
The artists in this exhibition operate at the sites of these cracks and tensions. Instead of resisting the shift they create artwork that sits comfortably at uncomfortable places. The result is artwork and thought that favours difference, texture, synthesis, hybridity, immediacy, agency, dislocation, indigeneity, sovereignty, queerness. It resists outmoded readings, and beckons you to engage with its complexities, to sit with the tension, find new ways of seeing.
Dark Objects asks you to consider the spaces that these artworks came from and that they now inhabit. The spaces from which they come, beneath the surface, are dark. The darkness is undefinable. It is the unknown, the alluring, the explicit, the molten, the textured, the kitsch, the cyborg. The artists included in this exhibition, Hana Pera Aoake, Clara Chon, Hye Rim Lee, Huni Mancini, Natasha Matila-Smith, Sorawit Songsataya and Jade Townsend, have the ability to dive into the depth of this opening, creating artworks that are fraught with the potency from between the cracks and below the surface. Don’t let their attractive appearance fool you: in each object, darkness is imminent.
Dark Objects is curated by Faith Wilson, the 2016 Blumhardt/CNZ Curatorial Intern.
Press
Hanahiva Rose, Dark Objects, Salient, Issue 6 2017, published 10 April 2017
Hanahiva Rose, all that was left was hope, Tautai, March 2017
Matariki Williams , Wānanga kōrero: Our mana is inherent, The Pantograph Punch, May 2017
New Zealand Festival, April 2017
