Dark Matter

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

“Dark Matter” brings together four contemporary artists from Aotearoa New Zealand – Simon Atwooll, 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. 

Image detail: Simon Endres