Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

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.

Jude Stevens is a Tāmaki-based artist who works amongst a practice of sculptural installation, and photography. His work often both circulating and reflecting on various materials, and structures that are connected to Aotearoa’s colonial histories.

His current exhibition at RM, Goldies Grove presents a sculptural installation of found uku and fallen Kauri, that reflects on the colonial implications of Goldies Bush. An area with a rich history of mass Kauri deforestation, as well experiencing the ongoing effects of Kauri dieback, a soil-borne pathogen. 

Stevens draws from these histories and offers up a beautiful installation that seeks to honor these raw treasured materials, and their individual histories. 

Maya caught up with Jude about the show and 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.

Marie Shannon is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice primarily explores the quotidian and profound details of her immediate domestic surroundings. Predominantly working in photography, but also video and drawing, Shannon delicately and intimately captures her subjects on a large-format camera, representing them at their finest through these beautiful vintage silver gelatin and large digital photographs. Narratives and objects of previous homes, love notes and faxes from her late husband Julian Dashper, and sketches by her son Leo alike, her memoiristic practice embraces both the mundane and the personal, inviting the viewer intimately into her world. 

Her current solo exhibition at Trish Clark Gallery, Life Stories, presents a curated selection and mini survey of her practice – spanning works from the 80s as well as those from more recent years. Presenting photographs and a body of moving image works, the show brings together over forty years of Shannon’s work, life, and practice, many of which were included in her survey exhibition, Rooms found only in the home, developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2018, which went on to tour Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland as well.

Sof had a kōrero with Marie Shannon about Life Stories and her overall practice.