A black and white exhibition featuring work by selected artists including James R. Ford, Veronica Herber, Philip Kelly and Patrick Pound.  

There will be no evening opening event for this exhibition but we will host a LISTENING EVENT: Saturday, 29 March, 3-6pm when artist Philip Kelly will play records from his collection as an audio response to the show, encompassing gauzy ambience, electronic minimalism and pop experimentation.  Refreshments and bean bags will be on offer.

Patrick Pound’s “Soft Real Estate” series consists of photographs taken with a low end amateur point-and-shoot digital camera held very close to found images so that the lens cannot focus clearly. The resultant works are blurry and largely indecipherable suggestions or allusions to the idea of a picture. This indefinite and pervasive blurriness plays on our desire to find clear meaning or content in what we see. The found images utilised by Pound come from newspapers so there is a sense that the pictures came to him rather than he going out into the world to find and take them. Pound’s near-obsessive accumulation of images, some of which become artworks, others not, is testament to his interest in deciphering the indecipherable, not to make it more visible but precisely to acknowledge its opacity. (Art Gallery of NSW, 2012)

As an artist, Veronica Herber has a  deep conversation with Japanese washi tape that she has developed over the past ten years. Each individual work forms part of a formalist practice with her working process on each piece leading to the next. These works are made from hand torn pieces of Japanese Washi Foto tape with a minimalist leaning, revolving around the structure of the grid.  "Veronica Herber uses torn washi tape and graphite to create a visual space that feels smoky, shifting, mysterious and almost cosmic”.  (Justin Paton, Senior Curator, International Art, Art Gallery of NSW, 2024)

In Philip Kelly’s work, the turntable is infrastructural, both technology and idea, fading into the background (as infrastructures do), underpinning his explorations of sound and image. Kelly’s elegant watercolours are the latest iterations of a technique developed during ‘lockdown’, when the dancefloors fell silent and the pandemic put social life on pause. Kelly developed this technique as a daily discipline, a ritual that kept the turntable in motion even though he was cut off from his community. This ritualistic approach merges the meditative with the automatic, at once reminiscent of generative art, automatic poetry and Japanese Sumi-e ink drawing. Though composed in concert with a turntable’s direct-drive, these works are as formal as they are generative, images emerging from a deep engagement with materials, media and their possibilities. Once again the turntable grounds the artist in the present, making space for listening and time for seeing.” (Margie Borschke, 2022)

Each of James R. Ford’s new “Finitude Drawings” is a series of lines and marks created by an outdated, robotic vacuum cleaner.  The robot has been hijacked, modified, and made to perform a task not fit for its intended purpose. The works are born from the idea of human finitude; our limits of time, space and ability. And how, throughout life, we metaphorically hit brick walls, back track, meander, and sometimes move in circles trying to figure things out. The naming convention of the series utilises gene symbols, and the genes referenced are all related to ageing, which in itself is a symbol for the natural finitude of human life.  “Ford has altered the appliance and made it perform a task not fit for its intended purpose.  In this sense, the object that creates these works is like a modified readymade....the robot vacuum could be considered captured, imprisoned and forced to do a dance of its own....The marks, tracks and smudges have a physicality and tactile grunginess that provides a break from the recent proliferation of digitally manufactured art” (Sinny Bonlaire, 2023)

This exhibition also includes the release of a new monograph on the work of James R. Ford.  The accompanying limited edition screenprint is in our office space.  Orders will be taken on both print and book and freight / postage will be from Wellington.  Estimated arrival time is two weeks.

Topsy-Turvy (book)
Published: 2025
Monograph of selected artworks by artist James R Ford, with accompanying texts, interviews and essays, from 2020-2024.
Text by: Peter Dornauf
Design by: James R Ford
Pages: 103
Format: Casewrap, full colour interior
Size: 152 x 229 mm
ISBN: 9780473711122
Price (NZD): $40 + P&P 

Topsy-Turvy (screenprint)
2025
Ink on 350gsm paper
42 x 29.7 cm
Edition of 25 + 3 A/P
Price (NZD): $550 (unframed) & $750 (framed) + freight

Please note that there will be no opening event for this exhibition and that it is a shorter show so gallery hours may vary.

Image: Philip Kelly