Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Jennifer Mason is a Tāmaki based oil painter, with a practice centered around Mason's passion for painting the figure, a subject typically known as ‘The nude’. 

Her current exhibition The Boundary of the Intelligible delves into new modes of exploration for the artist. In earlier works Mason typically focused solely on the figure, resembling elements of portraiture with references taken from posed models. But within this new body of work Mason has shifted her point of reference and has turned directly to the history of western art, and its iconic figures.

Recontextualizing these figures from art history and pulling them into her own paintings filled with vibrant prismatic fields of colour where bodies ascend, weightless and untethered. Removed from their past moments and brought into a world of tranquility with renewed vitality, separated from space and time.  

Maya had a chat with Jennifer about her show and overall practice.

Séraphine Pick is one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated painters, with a career spanning 30 years in which Pick investigates human experience through the material language of paint. 

Her paintings circulate this tension between figuration and its collapse, often bringing the figure forth into her ethereal compositions and then dissolving them back into themselves.

This new body of work presented within Paintings continues Pick's exploration of material dissolution and figural density, displaying a rich navigation of material applications. Each work leans into its own materiality, some soft and delicate, while others thick and textural. An act of deep listening and responding to the paintings themselves, with pic circling back to former ways of making through a new lens.

Maya had a kōrero with Séraphine about the show and overall practice. 

We Went to the Edges of Time is a new solo exhibition by artist Kathy Barry currently on at Melanie Roger Gallery. 

Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Barry represented Aotearoa on the international stage at the 32nd São Paolo Biennal in 2016, and was selected in 2023 as the recipient of the prestigious C Art Trust Award. Her first substantial survey exhibition in a public installation, Energy Work, with artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, was curated by Christina Barton for Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2022. 

In We Went to the Edges of Time, Barry has further explored the mode of making that has underpinned her practice since 2012, where she lets go of artistic agency, letting energy fields guide her watercolour drawings. 

Through a series of geometric mappings, the viewer is pulled into the energetic frequencies of Barry’s work and invited down a pathway of sorts to healing beyond familiar dimensions. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Kathy Barry about the exhibition, her process, and these ideas of relinquishing artistic agency.

The tongue to them is the latest exhibition at Artspace Aotearoa, bringing together the works of Darcell Apelu, Martha Atienza, Heidi Brickell, Buck Nin, and Yee I-Lann.

Together, the artists contemplate collectivity and language as tools for resistance through their respective visual mediums and languages from across Aotearoa, Malaysia and the Philippines they bring into Artspace Aotearoa’s space. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Kairauhī Curator of Artspace Aotearoa, Robbie Handcock, about the exhibition, and the ideas that bind these artists and their practices together.