Group Exhibition: "Shifting Channels"

24 June–23 July 2022
Group Exhibition
SHIFTING CHANNELS
RDS Gallery
6 Castle Street
Wednesday–Friday 11am–5pm
And by appointment (contact@rdsgallery.co.nz)

Hemi Hosking*Pippi Miller*Wesley John Fourie*Taarn Scott*Hana Pera Aoake*James Thomson-Bache*Troy Butler*Prudence Jopson

The RDS Gallery Group Exhibition "Shifting Channels" brings together artists associated with Dunedin – who represent the many facets of this city, underlining its tradition as “Nurse to the Imagination,” in the words of Charles Brasch. This year’s selection has in common a focus on translating experience (and the emotions that define it) into what we call art through the creative processes.

Hana Pera Aoake in "Maumahara (Wiri and Bella's Wedding at Okauia)," 2021, and Hemi Hosking in his series of silk screen prints engage with a legacy of cultural contexts rich in traditions that each uses to animate and represent their familial ties and the emotions that these evoke. Wesley John Fourie in "Mum’s Blankie (Other Love)," 2021, also draws upon family history, but as an individuated reservoir of intimacy and contradiction, given expression through an everyday object. James Thomson-Bache transcribes emotion as an abstracted visual field that “speaks” without saying a word in a set of line drawings characterised by a singular intensity. In "Dressing Up in Each Other’s Clothes," 2020, Pippi Miller explores the complexities of human relations through a meticulously rendered portrait of an unspecified sitter situated in an enigmatic interior mise-en-scène.

In contrast, Prudence Jopson and Taarn Scott turn to landscape for their primary source material, in particular the “coast,” where earth meets sea. For her series of small sculptures, Prudence retrieves found material, industrial detritus, reminding us of the fragility of our current ecology, in which the part (the eroding discarded cement block), stands in for the whole. In "Outlining/Shifting Channels," 2021, Taarn mobilises the language of cartography to depict the Nelson coastline as a delicate tracery, in threat of disappearance on a semi-transparent fabric that suggests a disintegrating sheet, or perhaps a shroud, hanging in a breeze. Similarly, Troy Butler’s series of photographic lithographs grapple with the transient, ineffable nature of experience, the location of which he records with absolute precision. The images themselves offer seemingly intangible traces of what once may have been there, a melancholic tribute to memory’s inadequacies.

Each work testifies to the ways in which the human animal seeks to give shape and form to its consciousness through artistic practices that mark out its status as an individual subject, unique and yet a part of the whole.

Hilary Radner
Dunedin, June 2022

Images
PIPPI MILLER, "Dressing Up in Each Other’s Clothes," 2020, gouache on paper, 430 mm x 34.5 mm unframed, 590 mm x 490 mm framed.

WESLEY JOHN FOURIE, "Mums Blankie (Other Love)," 2021, found materials (assorted cottons and mixed fibres, including velvet, satin, and silk with cotton, on wool blanket), 1670 mm x 1950 mm.

JAMES THOMSON-BACHE, "Eye Candy," 2022, fine liner on paper, 270 mm x 185 mm unframed, 445 mm x 320 mm framed.

JAMES THOMSON-BACHE, "New City Planning," 2022, fine liner on paper, 270 mm x 185 mm unframed, 445 mm x 320 mm framed.

TROY BUTLER, "13.74331° N 100.51047° E" [City], 2022, monoprint (photographic lithograph with gouache), 588 mm x 453 mm framed.

TROY BUTLER, "40.73322° N 74.00330° W" [Music], 2022, monoprint (photographic lithograph with gouache), 588 mm x 453 mm framed.