Creamy Psychology Opening, City Gallery Wellington, 2014 ___ “That’s quite Yvonne Todd”, a staff member said. I looked up. It was 2010 and I was out the back of the then Borders store on Lambton Quay loading books onto a trolley. The staff member didn’t realise she was in the […]
Yearly Archives: 2014
11 posts
Yvonne Todd: Creamy Psychology (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014). ___ “Long ago and oh so far away,” Karen Carpenter sings. Her voice swells, fills the song with far more longing than the lyrics contain. She sounds so ‘sweet and pure’, but she’s not really here; it’s just YouTube. Karen Carpenter […]
from Miles and Mabel, a novella ___ Tate Britain was crowded. Mabel and I weren’t the only citizens that had come out to look at an artwork the artist described as possessing the qualities of nothing. “It’s more powerful than I was expecting,” I said. The room was shady, as though […]
A Single Hurt Colour, reading, Litcrawl, November 2014 ___ In 2012 I was picked up from the Dunedin airport by a driver holding a sign: Megan Dunn and Jim and Mary Carr. I thought the sign was pretty funny. I had never met Jim or Mary but I knew they […]
New Revised Edition catalogue, City Gallery Wellington, 2013 ___ Little Gem Consider the lettuce (Lactuca sativa). It is good for you. Healthy. A lettuce is not calorific. Commonly associated with salads and slugs, the lettuce is a humble vegetable, first cultivated by the ancient Egyptians, who turned it from a […]
New Zealand listener, 26 Apr 2014 ___ In 1984 the first person died from an Aids related condition in New Zealand. Homosexuality was illegal. It would be another two years before the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was passed in 1986. Condoms were still primarily associated with the prevention of pregnancy; […]
NZ Listener, 23 August, 2014 ___ “My earliest memories are of growing up on a dairy farm in Takanini, just south of Auckland. One of my earliest memories is my father sawing horns off some cows; my father trapping hawks in a gin trap to protect the ducks on the […]
Off the Wall, Arts Te Papa, 2014 ___ The weave of the burlap is coarse as corduroy. The sun is boiling brown, surrounded by a white ring. The circle is the shape that completes this composition: the two gourd-like heads of Adam and Eve, their unequal eyes. Eve has blue […]
Art News, Autumn 2014 ___ “I think it’s about worry,” Nick Austin paused. “I think it’s about bad news.” Austin held the microphone at a right angle. “I think it’s about worrying about bad news.” Austin looked at his painting of a shark fin, inside the window of an envelope. […]
NZ Books, Issue 105, Autumn 2014 ___ Lateral Inversions: The Prints of Barry Cleavin contains over 120 colour plates and is a beautifully produced book that affords serious consideration to Barry Cleavin’s artwork. In the introduction author Dr. Melinda Johnston foregrounds Cleavin’s status as a major printmaker within New Zealand, […]
Circuit, January 31, 2014 ___ Smoke exhales from a pair of matte pink pipes; a young woman sways against a white washed background, the soft caw of seagulls rising. Last year Yvonne Todd produced two hypnotic moving image works. Smoke Emitters debuted at Sydney Contemporary in September and Denim Seagull […]