A Convenient Default at Pilot Gallery
What does a tower of sardine tins on the gallery floor and a man pinning up squares of white cardboard sheets on a gallery wall have in common? It’s all in the title of the show at Pilot Gallery, Hamilton, called, A Convenient Default. Artist Ammon Ngakuru is author of the silver stack of tins that exhibit a clean metallic appearance (devoid of any wrappings) and is simply entitled, Sardines. At a little over waist height, this singular construction of preserves call immediately to mind Warhol’s ubiquitous soup cans. But the artist is not concerned with any Pop Art points of interest here. Rather this lowly collection of turreted tins references in a comically manner the cheap default food that might be purchased by struggling artists trying to make a precarious living. The structure of the tins present in their repetitive formation a sculptural shape that takes on the appearance of any stack of cans appearing in a supermarket, and thus become, by default, a work of art. Joe Prisk, the second artist exhibiting in …