Exhibition

Wayne Youle: Look Mum No Hands

14 April – 3 September 2017

Wayne Youle Free of all distractions 2016–17. Cast bronze, enamel paint. Collection of the artist

Full to the brim with high energy, sharp-witted artmaking

This major solo exhibition features new and recent works in all manner of media, from a glistening cobweb in imitation gold chain and a supersized tyre swing, to hand knitted balaclavas and cast bronze gumballs. Deftly blending humour and provocation, Youle’s works traverse a range of concerns, including how different cultures perceive and label each other and how intangible qualities like loss, aging and love elude our attempts at measurement and explanation. Meticulously made and crisply presented, they all demonstrate Youle’s ability to complicate a simple visual premise with the lingering aftertaste of ambiguity.

Curator: Felicity Milburn
Exhibition number: 1031
Contemporary Art Partner

film

Wayne Youle

Exhibition

Dear John/ Welcome Back/ With Love

It might be old-school, but everyone likes to get a postcard, and Wayne Youle’s latest project invites visitors to communicate their Gallery experience, create their own art mail or just write a letter to their mum.

Exhibition

Tricksters

Expect the rug to be pulled out from under your feet with the last exhibition in the Rolling Maul series.

Exhibition

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

Stretching across a vast wall at the gateway to Sydenham, Wayne Youle's new public artwork is a shadowboard, where tools for rebuilding hang alongside many familiar but precious objects.

Director's Foreword

1 March 2017, by Jenny Harper

Welcome to 2017! We’ve all bounced back to work at our favourite gallery – and we’ve loved seeing a range of familiar faces at our exhibitions and events as well as the many new visitors enjoying what we have on display.

Artist Profile

Wayne Youle: Look Mum No Hands

22 February 2017, by Felicity Milburn

He’s been called a cultural prankster, an agent provocateur and a bullshit artist (that last description came from his dad, but it was bestowed – he’s pretty sure – with love). While we’re at it, add ‘serial pun merchant’ to that list; in art, as in conversation, Wayne Youle can spot a good one-liner a mile off and has never knowingly left an entendre undoubled.

Article

Sparks that fly upwards

1 December 2015, by Felicity Milburn

Curator Felicity Milburn remembers five years and 101 installations in a gallery without walls.

Collection

Wayne Youle ALONE TIME

An obsessively ordered, subversively witty re-imagining of Wayne Youle’s studio, ALONE TIME also evokes a more abstract space: the creative sanctuary any artist must carve out from everyday life for the serious business of making art. A bunker, a tree-house, a ‘room of one’s own’, it’s full to bursting with references to the humour, self-doubt and daily work ethic required to build and sustain an artistic practice – not to mention the magic wand.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Collection

Wayne Youle The Saviour

In the weeks and months that followed the devastating earthquake on 22 February 2011, many Christchurch people looked in vain for a ‘hero on a white horse’ to lead the city out of crisis. Galloping creakily to nowhere, Wayne Youle’s riderless Saviour punctures the notion of a knight in shining armour. Instead, it emphasises his belief that this city’s salvation lies in the hands of ordinary people: all those who stayed – through choice or necessity – and contributed to the recovery in countless, unsung ways.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Notes

The ghost of studios past

In preparation for the next issue of Bulletin, Gallery photographer John and I have been out photographing some of the local artists who will be taking part in Rolling Maul when we reopen.