Call and response

Five Wellington artists will kick off the Toi Pōneke Gallery’s 2007 exhibitions with Call and Response, a collaboration of works including photography, installation and multimedia.

Each artist in some way engages with and responds to a prompt, or ‘call’ from the past. These ‘calls’ take their form as memories of absent friends, old family photographs, childhood landscapes, loss of home and the origins of physical characteristics.

Caroline McQuarrie’s installation Woven Seam Binding Stay features garments that were made for each ‘absent’ person in her life (either through distance or death). This installation has great personal relevance for Caroline as she comes from a family of fabric artists. As well as the installation, Caroline will also incorporate embroidery onto some old family photographs to explore the connections between family members and they way people remember those relationships.

Marci Tackett’s work will consist of three large panel multimedia works, incorporating photographs, pigment and wax. She uses many layers and a build-up of colour to explore the surface of the body, scars, wounds and ideas of identity.

“I love the notion that everything that we are made up comes from the expansion of the universe,” says Marci. “As an artist, I aspire to be an inventor and an explorer in and of my life and its environment.”

Frankie Rouse’s photography explores ideas of home and identity based on the environment we grow up in. Frankie will display small, intimate photographs of the Newlands landscape where she spent her childhood. The images have a soft focus and dream-like quality to them, a facet that toys with the ambiguity of childhood memory.

As a North American living in Wellington, Mica Still’s work in the last several years has explored themes of migration and the concept of ‘home’. Her work will consist of a wall installation with several augmented plaster domes attached to it. Using wax and plaster, Mica has decorated the domes with various motifs that convey the shifting emotions surrounding family relationships, distance and loss.

Deidra Sullivan recently came across some ripped photographs while looking through some old family items. This curious find prompted her to use her grandparents’ family albums as materials in order to reconstruct histories that ask further questions about the past.

“While these stories and histories are specific to my own family history, I believe the family album is a cultural practice of narrative and storytelling that is recognisable to a large audience,” she says.

Deidra’s work will include alternative reproductions of these intriguing photographs, in the form of three framed wall works and a display case with smaller works.

Call and Response opens on Thursday 11 January at 5.30pm and runs until 3 February at the Toi Pōneke Gallery, Wellington Arts Centre, 61 Abel Smith Street.

To view Frankie's photographic research:

http://www.origindesign.co.nz/originart/frankie_rouse

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