Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Skye Lunson-Storey (Whakatōhea, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice explores climate change, urban infrastructure, site-responsive approaches, and Indigenous futurisms through various media – primarily working across moving image, sound, and sculpture to dissect her subject matter. 

Her current solo exhibition at Window Gallery, Te Mauri o te Wai, takes its name after Auckland Council's freshwater vision to protect and enhance the life-sustaining capacity of water – responding to the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Day floods and the ongoing failures of our urban water infrastructures through this sculptural installation. 

In Te Mauri o te Wai, concrete, steel, wool, rainwater, and harakeke act as vessels to resound the loss of wetlands in Aotearoa, holding great memory, mauri, and agency as materials. Here, the artist asks how we might shift from containing water to living with it – imagining a future where natural materials and infrastructures are treated as a healing aid and collaborator in our relationship with water.

Sof had a kōrero with Skye about Te Mauri o te Wai. 

Yvonne Todd is a Tāmaki-based multidisciplinary artist, whose practice tends to obscure the familiar through a range of media to explore her subject matter – imperfection, absurdity, and the uncanny, all guiding her material language. 

Her current solo exhibition at the Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead, Diary of a Carrot, sees Todd further explore this long-standing interest in food as a subject – using a melange of sculpture, found and personal objects, AI-generated imagery, and staged photography to make this absurdist narration on the act of eating. 

Best known for her work in staged photography, the show presents a shift in Todd’s process – using AI to produce a new series, Sullen 1880s Nibblers, which sees an assemblage of unenthusiastic Victorian women vacuously prodding at the plates of food they hold. 

Paired alongside personal archives, earlier work, and held within the historic home at Pah Homestead, here, food is not conceptually examined so much through the present, as it is through the past – allowing these notions of domesticity and nostalgia to thread and bind the works in the space, as viewers chew on the peculiar ways we engage with what, and how we consume. 

Sof caught up with Yvonne about Diary of a Carrot, and her wider practice. 

Maya caught up with artist Gian Manik, one of three artists showing work in Gus Fisher's new group exhibition, Dreaming From Afar. 

And Sof caught up with co-director of Michael Lett, Andrew Thomas, about Julian Dashper: Midwestern Unlike You and Me, which is a restaging of Dashper’s mid-career survey exhibition, originally touring the American Midwest from 2005-2006.

Whakarongo mai x

Dreaming From Afar is a new group exhibition showing at Gus Fisher which brings together the practices of Gian Manik, Brunelle Dias Primbs, and Tyrone Te Waa. The show circulates the complexities of history, and nostalgia through this painterly language that seeks to morph the physical with the imagined. 

Gian Manik is a Naarm-based painter, who produces mesmerising works that play with ​​various tropes preserved within the historical painting genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture. Within Dreaming From Afar Manik showcases a beautiful body of paintings that includes various methods of painterly application. Intimate and finely rendered works on oil on canvas, as well as these lively frescos that become one with the gallery space itself. 

The works themselves bring together Manik's fascination with historical painting, and old masters, alongside his research and exploration of orientalism and queer representation within art history. Pulling these themes together in space to produce works that grapple with the entrenched hetero and ethnocentric hierarchies of the western art cannon.

Maya caught up with Gian about the show and overall practice.