There is so much art activity going on at the moment in the Waikato that this review, of necessity, has turned into a compilation album. The Wallace Gallery in Morrinsville has become the hot place to be and be seen, and recently a group show entitled, Between the Lines, show-cased the work of artist, Rose Meyer. Her unique process of mark making involved the use of a device that creates an automatist line Max Ernst would be proud of. Her trick to producing a random series of lines on paper – a chaos of swarming marks or a bird’s nest of linear configurations that fill up an A3 size page, involves an ingenious methodology. She built a little ‘tray’ on wheels, punched a hole in the middle through which she fixes a pen. This device is then placed inside an A3 box with matching size paper and then the box is taken for a ride; literally. The back seat of a car is ideal, or, to up the ante, the box is sometimes posted through …

Somewhere out in the universe decaying stars that have morphed into deep black holes are converging and churning up space and time in a terrible cataclysmic process.. If an astronaut happened to be floating by in the vicinity, they would hear, (if still alive at that point) the sound the collision made. The sound might be a ringing or groaning, or screaming at a pitch high or low enough to reverberate throughout the eons of spacetime, for all time, eventually reaching us here on the planet. It might take a billion years but by the time it did reach us it would be so faint as to be ‘impossible‘ to hear. But machines are being built 4 square kilometres across, somewhere in America to pick up this sound and allow us to eavesdrop on these soft discordant cosmic notes. We call that, science. In New Zealand we put sensitive microphones down among the grapes to hear them fermenting. Or at least Kent Macpherson does, Master of Arts graduate in Music from Wintec.   This is …

The YES Collective is leaving K-Road, but not by choice. Rents are rising, leases have been abruptly cancelled, artists and artisans are being pushed out to make way for the shiny, the new, the very expensive. These are, of course, the final steps in a gentrification process that seems as inevitable as the tide – a process that actually began decades ago. Nonetheless, around K-Road, ‘gentrification’ is once again the word on everyone’s lips. So, YES has to go and, what better way to leave than with a show (or two).  If it helps to recoup the losses and pay off the debts incurred by running the space, then so much the better. Since 2014, the YES Collective have operated their K-Road loft as a “catalytic space”, open to all creatives. Projects, exhibitions and other artistic endeavours run by the collective have tried earnestly to be inclusive, provocative and forward thinking. A one-night-only event, The Makers was the penultimate of four final YES Collective experiences. The previous two involved a pot-luck dinner, games evening and …

There are a series of very slim and sardonic books doing the rounds at the moment, spoofs put out by those perennial Ladybird Book people. You might remember them from your more tender years coming at you with titles like “The Little Red Hen” and “Treasure Island”. These latest works have a bit more bite to them, aimed as they are at a slightly more mature and cynical demographic. They present with titles like, “The Vegan,” The Emo”, “The Sexist”, “The Gamer”, “The Vlogger”. The title I possess is called “The Hipster”. It has 52 pages making satiric jabs at targets dying to be jabbed at, subjects that include, scratch cinema, action poets and no-linear campaign provocateurs. Trendy fashion is one of the foci where the text begins: “Neena likes to wear hats made of forklift tyres and coloured balls.” Opposite the text is a Ladybird illustration of Neena smartly done out in said hat. But my all-time favourite would have to be the go at conceptual art. Opposite an illustration of things that are …

Marie Shannon has been following me. I met her in Auckland last year, she is still there. She was, until recently, in a window outside Vicbooks, a faint cello accompanying the smokers gathered on Kelburn Parade. She is, most resolutely, at my place of work and over the last four months I have learned to speak along with her. In What I Am Looking At, Shannon details the labour that follows a death. She lists, mostly: things that need naming, things that need putting away, photographs, artworks, clothing. It’s all flat affect, all restraint, except it also isn’t. It’s a dissociation from the scene of trauma, a channeling of energy into tracing the lines of a life, where it has been, what it has done and seen, what it has made. Or else it’s catharsis, or the promise that lists won’t ever threaten to contain a life. Lists are finite and neat by nature. Lives spill outwards, sometimes they find themselves unwilling or unable to be spoken of or recalled. Or else it’s simply that …

“Skinroom” is an apt name given to a new gallery recently opened in Hamilton, in the suburb of Frankton. The place had a former life as a tattoo parlour and now it’s given over to art of a different kind – no hearts with daggers plunged into them or dusky maidens in various stages of undress by moonlit beaches. Nothing as clichéd as that, though such could be employed these days at the ‘high’ art end, if treated with irony and the knowing smile. Director of the new gallery, Geoff Clarke (Wintec tutor and art theoretician) might want to dispute the above assertion and claim that the vernacular should be accepted on its own terms without any snooty placement of quotation marks. None are employed in this latest exhibition called “Pure Guava”. And yet with a title like that I sense a delicious irony lurking somewhere in the shrubbery. I can feel the quotation marks coming on. And yet, perhaps we should take this drink straight because the overall sense of the show from the …

Fear, horror, terror – all the primal human emotions gathered together in three simple words was the starting point for an exhibition of international print works exhibited recently at the Wallace Gallery, Morrinsville. It brought together 19 printmakers from around the world and displayed their work for the first time in New Zealand. The venture behind the show, called, The International Print Exchange Programme, (IPEP), was established as an annual event to raise the profile of printmaking. It does this by arranging multiple exhibitions of the same show worldwide through an agreed process whereby each selected artist consents to take home to their respective countries the 19 winning prints with instruction to have them exhibited. This year, New Zealand printmaker, Hanah-Amelia King was one of the selected artists. Her work, Narcissistic Significance, enabled New Zealand to have the opportunity to participate in this venture for the first time. Artists from India, Peru, Iran, Ukraine, Mexico, USA and Australia were involved, each producing one work that reflected on the tripartite and universal human emotions mentioned above. …

Over the last three years we have seen a popularity hike in the use of risograph as the print material supplementary to New Zealand Contemporary Art. It’s almost saturated the design market, at one stage seeming like a template to exhibition ephemera. It’s attractive for obvious reasons, it’s tactile, cheap and perfect for mass production. Most importantly, I think the attraction in the form was a desire to retract to manual print processes, almost nostalgic. The ‘digital screen print’ production allows a nature of layering and urgency, deeply embedded within political image making. James Cousins’ Restless Idiom at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery speaks design language. The 15 paintings ranging in sizes but mostly large all include a reproduced image (originally a photograph) and on top of that are contradictory abstract layers. Cousins employs various methods of layering – geometric stencils, floral arrangements, rolled paint – to create a dynamic image on a single painted plain. While the reproduced image is clearly there for a reason, deciphering exactly what it is, feels less important. Through the …