Gallery listings, informations

Current exhibition

Robyn Irwin & Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi
Hard Tactics
14 July – 8 August 2009
View in the gallery or online at: < http://www.bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz >

Hard Tactics is a light-hearted play on hard materials and the dynamic generated in the interaction between an artist’s goals and the medium employed to give form to that intent. Hard materials are true to themselves and their inherent characteristics help shape the work the artist produces.

ROBYN IRWIN is a glass artist producing distinctive painterly effects unusual in the medium. Inspired by New Zealand’s volcanic landscapes, she eschews the conventional translucency of her medium and employs opaque glass to suggest the patterns solidified in rock as viscous molten lava cools. In less than a decade of practice as a glass artist, Irwin has established an impressive track record with work in public and private collections in New Zealand, Australia and the United States including Te Papa, the Ebeltoft Glass Museum in Denmark and Elton John.

SOPELEMALAMA FILIPE TOHI is a leading Polynesian sculptor who works with a range of materials including wood, stone and steel to create three-dimensional sculptures that represent a contemporary rendering of the traditional pan-Polynesian lashing (lalava) used on houses, canoes and tools. In abstracting this ancient technology, he weaves past and present, Polynesian and western art, to create distinctive new forms that speak to as much to geometric abstraction as to his own heritage. Tongan-raised, Tohi has lived in New Zealand for 30 years. He has worked full-time as an artist since 1990 and has exhibited widely throughout the world. He has major public sculptures in New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Japan and China.Images attached:
RI09install – caption: Hard Tactics at Bartley + Company Art
RI09sulphurvent – caption: Sulphur vent by Robyn Irwin

Next exhibition

Marcia Lyons
Emergent Submersives
11 August – 5 September 2009
Bartley + Company Art is very pleased to present Marcia Lyons’ first solo exhibition in New Zealand. An American, now resident here, Lyons has been working at the forefront of digital arts practice since the early-1990s, as both an artist and educator. She has exhibited in the United States and in Europe; career highlights include winning the prestigious Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome in 1997 and inclusion in the 1994 exhibition by the Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum, In the lineage of Eva Hesse. She established the Digital Media Fine Arts programme at Cornell University in the United States in 1998 and came to New Zealand in 2005 to develop the Digital Media programme at Victoria University of Wellington.

Emergent Submersives, is based on her research over the past year into the mysterious ‘toning’ performed by Humpback whales in the Hawaiian waters between Maui, Lanai and Molokai islands – a little understood ritual (possibly akin to chanting) that they are believed to have carried out at the same point for millions of years. As scientists investigate this phenomenon, so too, Lyons’ probes prevailing views, political attitudes and knowledge surrounding this mammalian behaviour. To do this, she learnt to dive, to descend over 30 metres to record and then translate and network the ocean depths and their sonic reverberations from sea into air space.

The exhibition is made up of four elements – audio, a still sonic painting and two ‘live paintings’ constantly being created from moving images – which combine to create an immersive deeply blue, expansive underwater world within the gallery.

ENDS

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