Elisabeth Pointon
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1992
Pākehā,
Fijian-Indian,
Pasifika
Best Wishes.
- 2019
- Oxford cloth, blower
- Purchased 2020
- 2021/006
Tags: inflatable, punctuation marks, red (color), words
Informed by her employment at a luxury car dealership, Elisabeth Pointon’s practice considers language, accessibility and representation. Appropriating both the conventions of corporate language and the visual language of advertising, Pointon comments on the largely white and masculine-led environments of the workplace and the art world.
Get it right. is drawn from an email circulated at Pointon’s workplace, relating to staying on task and meeting financial targets, but is also a phrase that has arisen in Pointon’s interactions with curators and gallerists in the art community. Borrowing this phrase that hints at the financial bottom line permeating target-driven work environments, Pointon relates it to the experience of emerging artists, and to the expectation they face to capitalise on the opportunities that come their way.
Holly Best, Uncomfortable Silence: 7 March - 19 July 2020
Exhibition History
Related
film
The work of Elisabeth Pointon
Curator Melanie Oliver discuses Elisabeth Pointon's work Best wishes which appears in the exhibition Uncomfortable Silence at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
In this talk, Melanie refers to this conversation between the artist and Robbie Handcock.
Commentary
RE: UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE
In a recent essay Zadie Smith wrote of language as a “verbal container” – like all containers it allows the emergence of some ideas while limiting the possibility of others. The words and terms we choose, or those which are offered to us, “behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think.” She is discussing writing fiction, defending the right to, and value of, drifting into other imagined bodies and taking a good look around, regardless of their likeness to our own biographical specifics. It is an uncomfortable position to hold in a cultural climate where, Smith argues, “the old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.”