Alter + Ego: a Mobile Visual Arts Exhibition

For immediate release: Wellington January 20, 2010.

Alter + Ego: a Mobile Visual Arts Exhibition
FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 2
WELLINGTON FRINGE FESTIVAL 2010

A mobile exhibition of tiny proportions is popping up around Wellington especially for the New Zealand Fringe Festival. Alter+EGO is a visual arts exhibition that investigates artists egos as individuals and as performers – the relationship between our everyday identity and our ‘performance’ identity. While some artistic egos may be larger than life, the show’s curator Vaune Mason insisted that in this exhibition, all the works be squeezed into the back of a truck.

Mason has collected an unusual mix of artists covering a range of disciplines and approaches. They include established contemporary artists like jeweller Peter Deckers, photographers who have contemporary as well as commercial practices like Nicole Freeman (selected for the Wallace art awards and exhibited at the Govet Brewster) and emerging artists like sculptor Wai Familton. In total there are 21 artists involved: painters, illustrators, costumiers, jewellers and sculptors.

The venue for the exhibition is equally unusual: The Palace is a 4 ton truck that usually carts around the circus equipment for Fuse Circus, but also masquerades as a mini mobile venue - allowing this exhibition to “pop up” round Wellington. Its part of the humour of the exhibition that even the venue has an “alter-ego”. Keep an eye out for the red and white truck, parked up at the Railway Station, Odlins Plaza on the waterfront and Courtenay park on the corner of Taranaki and Courtenay Place.

Mason says that when planning the exhibition, the idea that the works would be really squeezed together in the truck was a positive.
Mason says “I wanted to create a sense of the tensions involved in an artist’s world. Our sometimes egocentric behaviors can contrast with desires for anonymity or a fear of exposure. I think that the works placed like this will create a sense of struggle for individual identity, and form a rich visual world for visitors to the show.”
The image of an art gallery in the back of a truck might suggest something rough and ready, but don’t be fooled. Alter+EGO offers Fringe goers a small but intense burst of beautiful, whimsical and sometimes very personal arts experience.

The Alter + Ego gallery will be located:
• Odlins Plaza (the waterfront by Macs Brewery) 25th and 26th February from 12 – 7pm
• Courtenay Park cnr Taranaki St and Courtenay Place February 27th 10 – 7pm and 28th 10 – 5.
• The Wellington Railway Station, March 1st and 2nd from 10 – 4pm.

Alter Ego is funded by CNZ through the Kakano Fund, and is supported by Fringe, Workspace Studios and Fuse Circus.

ENDS

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