Meg Porteous and Rea Burton Nancy Treadler (still) 2022. Single-channel digital video; duration 7 min, 38 sec. Courtesy of the artists
Meg Porteous and Rea Burton Nancy Treadler (still) 2022. Single-channel digital video; duration 7 min, 38 sec. Courtesy of the artists
Meg Porteous and Rea Burton Nancy Treadler (still) 2022. Single-channel digital video; duration 7 min, 38 sec. Courtesy of the artists
This exhibition is now closed
In this moving-image work, artists Meg Porteous and Rea Burton take inspiration from preening pigeons outside their studio to create an exaggerated mimicry of the art world.
The main character, Nancy Treadler, is based on infamous New York gallerist Mary Boone. Before her imprisonment for tax evasion, Boone’s speculative approach to promoting artists was influential in developing the international art market’s hunger for new talent. Clacking her stilettos and delivering a persuasive spiel to a prospective collector, Treadler is every bit the chic art dealer. Yet, the similarities between her bird-like posturing and the pigeons pecking at seed and food scraps reveal a slipping façade between persona and reality. The scavenging creatures outside the high-rise building might not be so different from those inside after all…
Read a piece to accompany this work by Bridget Riggir-Cuddy here.
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Date:
10 March – 9 July 2023 -
Curator:
Jane Wallace -
Exhibition number:
1158
Related reading: Video art
Exhibition
Uncomfortable Silence
7 March – 19 July 2020
Fresh work by early career New Zealand artists that is both enigmatic and unsettling.
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.”
Collection
Meg Porteous Self-portrait (The Master)
Meg Porteous offers a contemporary take on the artistic tradition of self-portraiture with this confronting and intimate photograph. In it, we see her performing two roles: artist and muse. The awkwardness of her position reflects the complexities that exist around representations of the female body as a muse throughout art history. Most often, it has been depicted by men and intended for a largely male audience. Here, Meg takes agency of her own image, forcing us to reconsider the acts of seeing and of being seen.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Notes
A Quick Q&A with James Oram
Over lockdown, Ōtautahi artist James Oram made a new work for our online exhibition Spheres: An Online Video Project. I asked him a few questions about the making of the work, which is up on our website until the end of October.
Commentary
Memory Pictures
… it suits me to take pictures on celluloid that were formerly pictures of the mind, memory pictures, pictures of the imagination …
Exhibition
Edith Amituanai and Sione Tuívailala Monū: Toloa Tales
New video works trace migratory threads across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as the artists return to their ancestral homeland.
Exhibition
Bridget Reweti: Ziarah
Ziarah is an Arabic word that refers to an ancestral or spiritual pilgrimage to a gravesite. Developed while artist Bridget Reweti was on residency in the Indonesian city of Jogjakarta, this work traces her attempt to find the unmarked graves of navigator Tupaia and his nephew and apprentice Taiata on nearby Damar Besar Island.
Exhibition
Max Fleury and Anna Brimer: Glory
A playful video of impromptu water fountains made from everyday objects.
Exhibition
Aydriannah Tuiali: Kōwhai
In Te Ao Māori, waiata (songs) are often used to retain memories, knowledge and whakapapa. The meditative chant that artist Aydriannah Tuiali’i performs here urges us to reflect on our ancestors, to look for sustenance and future wellbeing through our connections to the past.