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New exhibitions at Blue Oyster

January 26 to March 5: interfaces, by Molly Samsell, 4:00am Tondo Rondo by Catharine Hodson & Antoinette Wood, & Anistropy by Alexandra Kennedy, at Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 24b Moray Place, Dunedin.

Spatial experience: three artists intercede

Collections of discarded materials, wall drawings and full-scale, skin-like photographs will be on show at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin from late January.

Interfaces
Full-scale photographs of the walls of the gallery space and photographs which are like 'skins' of the wall are in the exhibition interfaces, by photographer Molly Samsell.

Samsell aims to make the gallery space not just a place to put art, but an interaction with the art. She also wants the viewer to be able to apply their own meaning to the photographs by seeing them as more than just an image or record of something.

"So much time can be spent looking at an image without ever seeing the photograph. By taking a moment to consider the photograph, it exposes the whole process that leads up to the instant when an image is made. By physically scaping away the materiality of the photograph, the work in this exhibition reveals that the moment captured in an image is ephemeral and fabricated," says Samsell.

In a technique Samsell has developed herself, the backing of some of the photographs will be sanded down so that they become a fine membrane. These will be mounted directly on to the wall they are of, so that in places the wall and photograph will be indiscernible. While the photographs will be in colour, they will be printed on matte paper to mimic the texture of the wall and will be as near an exact image of the gallery wall as arguably possible.

4.00am Tondo Rondo
Dried banana skins, chewing gum, disposable cups and other collections will be the basis of the works in 4.00am Tondo Rondo.

Artist Catharine Hodson works in collaboration with a ‘surface engineer’, Antoinette Wood, who cleans commercial and civic buildings at night.

"Antoinette and her crew deal with all sorts of rubbish when they are cleaning. We have used these as a resource while playing on conceptual and material parallels in contemporary art," says Hodson.

“This result is an exhibition which juxtaposes the white-walled gallery and its protocols of presentation and current ideas with that of the world of the night worker, who cleans and collects."

The exhibition is called 4.00am Tondo Rondo 'Tondo' is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, and the artist uses this shape as a compositional device. ‘Rondo’ refers to both a playful, fast, repeating dance in a circle and the pressurised pace and repetitive work of the surface engineers.

"The exhibition is a conversation about art and work. The viewer is invited to think about the valuing of people and their work in relation to the practice of art and the monetary value of its production," says Hodson, who is a lecturer at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology's School of Arts and Media.

Anistropy
Wall drawings that investigate conceptual ideas about space are presented in the exhibition Anistropy by Alexandra Kennedy.

In a number of separate, but related works, Kennedy makes uses of the principles of non-isometric space, including reverse or inverse perspective. There is a negotiation between the idea of space and the experience of space.

“These ideas have a genealogy that stretches back to the early 20th century and the ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov concerning cosmic space as the arena and anti-gravity, or the overcoming of gravity, as the project for artistic activity,” says Kennedy.

“Some years later Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin was developing his notions concerning ‘planetary feeling’ and ‘tilted space’ as ways of overcoming Euclidean perspective.”

Anistropy follow on from work produced for exhibitions held in The Netherlands during and at the conclusion of a residency undertaken in Rotterdam in 2010.

The three exhibitions open on 25 January and run until 5 March 2011.

ENDS

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