Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

The Balcony is an exhibition by artist Selina Foote that is currently being shown at Two Rooms. The Balcony presents a series of geometric acrylic and graphite works on canvas that emerge from familiar 19th century paintings and their reproductions. 

Through a process of self prescribed rules Foote transforms these reproduction images of 19th century paintings, radically defamiliarizing them and bringing them into a place of full geometric abstraction. Lost within their own technologies of reproduction but also pulling them back into a place of painterly materiality. 

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

The Oshima Gang is an exhibition by Theo Macdonald, currently showing at RM Gallery. 

Macdonald is a Tāmaki-based interdisciplinary artist with a focus on still and moving documentary photography and cinematography to explore his interest in public expressions of militarism, national identity, and collective and personal memories. 

As an experimental documentary, The Oshima Gang sees Macdonald revisiting five colonial institutions in Tāmaki Makaurau that were featured in Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence’, which came out in 1983. 

Using Fūkeiron, or Landscape Theory, as a mode of cinematic communication – layering Super 8 film with archival text and raw production audio – Macdonald uses these sites of colonial architecture to invite viewers to consider and critique our identity in Tāmaki Makaurau, placing historical ideas, documents, and international relationships in dialogue with our present. 

Sof had a kōrero with Theo Macdonald about The Oshima Gang and these thematic interests that underpin his practice. 

Studio X is an exhibition by Ōtepoti-based artist Graham Fletcher, currently on at Gow Langsford Gallery. 

Fletcher is known for his representations of architecture, interiors, art, and the domestic, bringing together contemporary and customary forms, and intermixing Western high art and indigenous traditions in his paintings. 

Inspired by the likes of Mattisse’s The Pink Studio (1911), in this new body of work, Fletcher reflects on the intimate artist’s studio as his locational subject, transforming the physical space of artmaking into art itself. 

Not depicting any one specific studio or space, the paintings extend an interest in Fletcher’s practice in the ways in which he can visually communicate complex cultural discourses between Western and non-Western settings, often in a contemporary Pacific and New Zealand context, speaking to his own Samoan and European heritage.

Sofia had a kōrero with Graham Fletcher about Studio X and his process. 

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.