Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Concrete is Ruth Cleland’s second solo exhibition of new and previously unexhibited works, currently on at Sumer Gallery.

Cleland is known for her photorealistic depictions of everyday subjects and scenes, with this exhibition exploring concrete flooring in locations and sites she regularly encounters. The works are more than representations of concrete, but a collection representative of equanimity, eliciting a state of quietude within the viewer.

This body of work shows a subtle but significant development in Cleland’s practice, whereby more emphasis has been placed on the interrelationship between her gridded paintings and photorealistic concrete floor depictions, and how they respond to one another. As in previous works, this exhibition continues Cleland’s ‘sustained inquiry into image and grid—of subject, time, and value—as she traverses the hyperreal and abstract.’

Sofia had a kōrero with Ruth about Concrete, as well as her practice and process more generally.

A Century of Modern Art is Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s latest exhibition, surveying a century of visionary and influential painters who transformed modern art. 

Exhibiting the likes of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh, and premier examples by pioneering artists of the American and European avant-garde, A Century of Modern Art is an extensive collection of fifty seven works by fifty three artists. 

The exhibition takes the viewer through the evolution of modern art through key defined art movements, beginning with the Impressionists of the 1860s, making its way through movements such as PostImpressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. These works revolutionised Western modern art and continue to inspire those in the present. 

Sofia had a kōrero with co-curator and Senior Curator of International Art, Dr Sophie Mathiesson, about the show and working with the Toledo Museum of Art to bring this collection to Tāmaki Makaurau

Raisa Mclean is a Melbourne based interdisciplinary Artist navigating her practice through a mode of visual song-making. Mclean produces bodies of work that speak to themes of hauntology, and the ephemerality of memory.

In an attempt to hold and to give form to memory, Mclean explores multiple modes of narrative within her current show Heatwave to welcome viewers into an installation of a fragmented diary. Memories of summers, both past present and future, each haunted by the other. 

Maya had a chat with Raisa about her practice and current show Heatwave on at RM.

Tala o le tau is an exhibition showing new and significant work by Angela Tiatia and Yuki Kihara opening tonight at Gus Fisher Gallery.

The exhibition title, Tala o le tau, meaning ‘stories from the weather’ in Sāmoan, borrows its name from the poetic translation of ‘weather forecasts’ used by Sāmoan weather services. Collectively, the works explore themes of the climate crisis in the Pacific, engaging with indigenous knowledge systems, femininity, and matrilineal histories to navigate into an uncertain future. 

Kihara’s work is a collaborative piece made with women from the Moata’a Aualuma Community, a group of skilled weavers and embroiderers based in the central north coast of Upolu Island, Sāmoa. Together, they have created five vibrantly coloured mats, reflecting a community, collective, and indigenous approach to issues of climate change. 

The exhibition is also showing a moving image work of Tiatia’s, The Dark Current, which is a three-part video acknowledging the past, present and future through a Sāmoan lens, exploring the intersections between colonialism, femininity, and our relationship with the virtual and physical realm. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Angela Tiatia about her work in Tala o le tau and her practice as a whole.