Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

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. 

Zina Swanson is a Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist working amongst an artistic practice of painting, drawing, sculpture and instalation. Her practice delves into the exploration of the both fluctuating and porous relationship between humans and the natural world—often looking into these uncanny plant-related lores that occupy a slight nod to a darker view of humanity's relationship with the natural world.

Her current exhibition on at Sumer, Their Seeds Are Winged and Borne in Pairs continues and builds on Swanson's exploration of the natural world, navigating its rhythms and textures. Within this exhibition Swanson looks to the Sycamore plant, specifically their seeds. Producing an inquisitive new body of work that includes series of paintings, both acrylic on canvas and watercolour on paper, as well as human scale sculptures in clay and painted steel. 

Inviting us to look a bit closer at the natural world around us, and ponder in its porous boundaries between humans.

Maya had a kōrero with Zina Swanson about the show and overall practice.