Eyecontact, 24 August, 2012 ___ Reading Room is an exhibition with plenty of character. Look through the window of Objectspace today and you will see the rubble of a bookcase, lined with books, face out and spine on. A low-lying table is scattered with more titles, some splayed open, others […]
Art Writing
Fishhead Magazine, August 2012 ___ It’s one of those Wellington weekends, where the wind is whipping the trees outside the window and the cat flap keeps blowing open dramatically, even though the cat is sitting on the couch by the heat pump. I’m wondering what it would be like […]
NZ Listener, 12 July, 2012 ___ Multidisciplinary artist Sharmila Samant has been in the country for four days when I call her to discuss the socially based artwork she will develop in the New Plymouth community. Our conversation quickly turns to the availability of water. “The thing about water is […]
1. You can always use more bling. 2. There’s a fine line between selling and selling out. 3. The afterlife can be accessorised. 4. Art is retail. (But it doesn’t always sell.) 5. Not all art is created equal. 6. If it hurts maybe it’s because you’re not laughing hard […]
Auckland Art Gallery News, 2004 ___ A collective gulp accompanied the announcement of the winner of the first Walters Prize two years ago. Harald Szeemann chose fledgling photographer Yvonne Todd because her work was “the most irritating”. Todd rode the wave of stardom, producing four new bodies of work in […]
Pavement, No.51, February/March 2003 ___ Experiencing my first Yvonne Todd exhibition was like being haunted by the ghost of my own depraved adolescence. 1998’s Fleshtone revelled in the seedy sexuality and misguided glamour of Todd’s Takapuna teenage years. “I used to wear a hot pink leather miniskirt, over-the-knee suede […]
Pavement Issue 57, February/March 2003 ___ “My drawings of snakes don’t even look like snakes,” shrugs Francis Upritchard. This is not quite true. On a piece of white paper, a lumpy blue outline coils into an impressive portrait of a carpet snake – the fat frumpy kind made to lie […]
Pavement, April/May 2001 (Issue 46, page 26) _____ An inherently melancholy mood pervades Michael Harrison’s latest exhibition I’ve Got This Friend. This feeling is captured by peculiar personifications of Harrison’s pet subject: the cat. Harrison’s cats are an intriguing continuation of his interest in the mysterious nature of attraction. The formerly […]