Dark Matter

OPENING EVENT: Friday, 8 May, 5.30-7.30pm

“Dark Matter” brings together four contemporary artists from Aotearoa New Zealand – Simon Attwooll, Harry Culy, Simon Endres and Kirsten Roberts - each exploring the gothic and uneasy in their practises. 

"The Gothic is a vague and rubbery category.  When you go looking for the Gothic, you can find it in anything dark, deadly or diseased. Critics will forge—and have forged—different personal canons of New Zealand Gothic..... But the question remains: why is New Zealand home to the Gothic when it is supposed to be such a nice place?..... New Zealand Gothic flourishes as an expression of who we are but also of who we do not want to be. Would-be refugees from the ‘half-gallon quarter-acre Pavlova paradise’ are happier imagining themselves besieged by ancestral curses, sadistic nannies, mass-murderers, iced-up paranoids, and vampires. For all its supposed darkness and disruption, the Gothic is fundamentally romantic and reassuring: it is a mode of enjoyment, a way of taking pleasure. And that’s why it will never be part of a utopian bicultural solution. Because in preferring the Gothic, we prefer the problem.”

 - Robert Leonard, “Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic”, Art and Australia, Spring 2008. 

Harry Culy’s work is openly influenced by the Antipodean Gothic art movement that Robert Leonard writes about. He says of this movement, “I don’t exactly know why I’m interested in this type of work. I think I am subconsciously drawn to it. It’s difficult to describe, but it draws on Freud’s notion of the uncanny. I have spent a lot of time going down the rabbit hole, researching, reading books, watching films, looking at gothic painting and art, looking at ideas behind the gothic, like post-colonial discourse, and the way it works on a psychological level. I’m drawn to the feeling it gives me. More than anything it’s a feeling of being unsettled, of uneasiness, of anxiety. That feeling seems to echo my relationship to Aotearoa and my own sense of ‘home’.”

Kirsten Roberts has made a new series of monoprints. Small in scale at around postcard size, these works are nonetheless powerful in the expression and emotions that Roberts captures within her figures. “These monotypes, through an intimate process of wiping ‘light’ into the dark inked plate, manifest as the shadowy forms of a sense of imperfect physical self and that of a psychological interiority. The figures are emergent, not from references but appear out of the ink until I sense a connection. The darkness suggests both a Hadean underworld and velvety womb where, teetering between expulsion and rebirth, shapes and forms are wiped away into existence. The image is then rubbed or rolled onto paper, a triumphant reversal and strange mockery of all that I knew to be true.”

Simon Endres presents recent work from his menagerie of anxious misfits. “These are real-life avatars that wobble with the push and pull of competing emotional states and semantic codes, alongside clichés, feints, a certain repulsiveness – and few one-liners. Characters and characteristics have emerged over time from a mix of political intent, playful improvisation, material curiosity, and a need for comic relief to cut through their darker side. If asked to describe what they are I would call them hard-boiled cartoons.”

Pōneke based artist Simon Attwooll’s recent housefire series layers charcoal scraped from a burnt out house - “Considering destruction as a form of creation, I am thinking of the house fire image to reflect current universal anxieties surrounding loss, uncertainty and radical change yet also suggests a renewal, a fresh start from which new ideas and methods of working can have an opportunity to develop. I like the idea of reinvention which is made possible by the knowledge gained through the erasure of something old. Layering charcoal scraped from found burnt out houses, I experimented with a process to construct an image of found house fires to bring the material world into these works which sit between but isn’t quite photography, printmaking and painting. An object made from the materials the image represents.”

Image detail: Simon Endres