Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Rosa Allison is a Pōneke-based artist primarily working amongst a painting practice. Producing beautiful oil paintings on canvas that are heavily informed by the natural world. 

Her current show an at Melanie Roger Gallery, Veriditas showcases a stunning series of paintings that continues in Allison's exploration of the natural world. The title of the show itself Veriditas, refers to a concept coined by 12th Century German Mystic, Hildegard Von Bingen. The word refers to a kind of greenness, a vitality and lifeforce that inhibits all living things. Like a sap that flows through the natural world, embodying all things with a kind of liveliness. In turn re-imagining the divine as not something that sits above nature, but rather within nature. 

The works themselves lean into this exploration of Veriditas, taking on this enriched green colour pallet that flows between works to create a visual landscape of greenness. Slipping in between abstraction and figuration, with imagery of snakes, birds, plants, mushrooms, and human bodies— both arising and slipping back into the work itself. Resulting in a luminous exhibition that pulls viewers into a space of liveliness that re-centers nature, and our ecological system.

Maya caught up with Rosa about the show as well as her overall practice.

Grace Aotearoa is a Tāmaki-based gallery, which specialises in the representation of early career artists within Aotearoa. Directed by Emil Scheffmann, the gallery has recently relocated from its former Pitt Street home into Symond Street’s historic Rationalist House. A building rich with history, Rationalist House has been owned by the New Zealand Association of Rationalists & Humanists since 1960 – having been home to the Association’s library, an infamous jazz club, the Society for Closer Relations with the USSR, and, for many years, the Socialist Party. As a gallery with a reputation for championing younger emerging artists, it feels apt that Grace now sits between AUT, Whitecliffe, and Elam, at the heart of fine arts education in Tāmaki. 

Sof caught up with gallery director Emil Scheffmann about the move, as well as their current joint exhibition showing Atarangi Anderson and Georgia Tikaputini Douglas Hood, Mau Āhua.

Anto Yeldezian is a Tāmaki-based artist of Armenian heritage, who works amongst an expanded painting practice that often leans into methodologies of printmaking. Utilising methods of monoprinting, and stencils, along with a playful use of paint and material exploration.

Within his current solo show Desert Island on at Coastal Signs, Yeldezian presents a series of 7 large scale works on raw loose canvas. Installed in a manner in which the works almost engulf the gallery walls, and bring the space into a continuous field of symbols, and marks. 

The works themselves harness this heavy use of motifs, and symbols as a kind of centering point to the show. The references include camels, palm trees, oil pump-jacks, Homer Simpson's thirsty bird'; ancient fossils, the triple Gs of Canterbury Clothing Company, union jacks and logos of American defence and oil companies. 

Through the making of the work Yeldezian takes these symbols and applies them to various painterly techniques that almost pull them away from their own inherent meanings/references and into this place of a pattern-like language with its own set of meanings.

Maya caught up with Anto about the show as well as his overall practice.

Claudia Jowitt is a Tāmaki-based maker whose practice explores the sculptural possibilities of paint, moving between the two and three-dimensional, employing a myriad of tools and kitchen implements - from icing bags and decorator tips to tile grouting combs - to squeeze, manipulate, and build paint onto her canvas. Paint, shells, coral, masi, and seaweed layered like sedimentary rock and forming these beautiful webs of delicate pastels, Jowitt pushes the boundaries of traditional definitions of what makes a painting, challenging the constraints of the canvas and frame in these rhythms of movement. 

Her current solo exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery, Ua Levu, follows on from her recent solo presentation at the Dowse in Wellington, Uana: Carried by the Waves, presenting her work in a variety of forms – some more as paintings, others more as sculpture, as well as cyanotypes, too. 

Sof had a kōrero with Claudia Jowitt about Ua Levu and her wider practice.