Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Matthew Galloway is a Pōneke based artist known for his research-lead practice in which he navigates his making through this design sensibility, examining the infrastructures within our everyday lives. Producing socially engaged installations that include sculpture, prints, and video work.

His current exhibition Watch History at Sumer continues Galloway's approach to the world through this design landscape. Producing an installation of over 70 engraved iPhone 16 on luxury modular couches, developed during his time at the McCahon House residency earlier this year. 

Over 70 iPhones engraved in fragments of text, taken from lines and closed captions from various films and tv shows that the artist watched. Showcasing an unusually fixed screen with a watch history that removes itself from all context, media and human. Creating a dynamic, and at times absurd array of text in which the viewer encounters at their own pace and path navigation.

Maya had a chat with Matthew about the show and overall practice.

Louise Bourgeois: In Private View is a new exhibition currently on view at The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Louise Bourgeois born in 1911, was a French-American artist with a career spanning seven decades of her life, one of the great figures within modern art. She was best known for her large-scale sculptural work and installations, but also had a practice within drawing, painting, prints and fabric work. Bourgeois work often dealt with these psychologically charged themes of memory, family, the body and the subconscious—commonly drawing from her own personal memories and childhood.

Louise Bourgeois: In Private View, showcases work from a never publicly exhibited before private collection. This intimate collection showcases works that span over six decades of her career. From early paintings, to a closer look at her iconic spider series, her sculpture of hanging spiraled entangled limbs, The couple, to later fabric work made in the final years of her life. A beautiful and intimate showcase of Louise Bourgeois work through time.

Maya caught up with senior curator of global contemporary art at The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Natasha Conland about the show.

Cindy Leong is a Tāmaki-based painter whose practice probes abstraction as a medium for meditation. Driven by Eastern philosophy, the works cultivate a quality of stillness, inviting a quiet contemplation whereby time is paused for a moment of equanimity – enticing a reflection of the self and the surrounding forces of our environments that sit in tension and harmony with one another. For Leong, her artmaking process is just as meditative as she intends the works to be received. 

Her solo exhibition, A Moment’s Interlude, opens tonight at Public Record. Each work taking the form of a diptych, Leong applies muted, monochromatic colours drawn from nature, combining oil with incense ash on linen to build these textural paintings. Her mark-making moves across the canvas unrestrained in tension with the grid that holds the structure of their form. 

Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, Sofia had a kōrero with Cindy Leong about A Moment’s Interlude and her overall practice.

Cinemal: the Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film is artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne Tessa Laird’s latest book. 

Inquisitive, passionate, and attentive is Laird as she traces the ways in which experimental films mimic the mystery and magic of animals, examining how they’re depicted in film and the animal qualities that transpire in cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colours, and voices. 

With a focus on films from Aotearoa, Australia, and South America, Laird’s energetic, observant, and illustrative prose brings together personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy. In identifying these cinematic animal tropes, readers are encouraged to rethink what it means to be human and our own animal nature, reminding us that we, too, are animals. 

To launch Cinemal, there will be a special screening of films by Nova Paul, Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, Tina Stefanou, and Peter Waples-Crowe with Glynn Urquhart, featuring a live soundtrack by Phil Dadson tonight at the Audio Foundation in association with Melanie Roger Gallery. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Tessa Laird about Cinemal: the Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film and the film screening tonight.