Erica van Zon | Enmeshed: Feminist Modes of Information Sharing | Ashburton Art Gallery
Erica van Zon has recent work in the new exhibition "Enmeshed: Feminist Modes of Information Sharing" at the Ashburton Art Gallery 11 May - 22 June 2025.
To be ‘enmeshed’ is to be entangled or immersed. Mesh itself can also be a knitted or woven textile, or an interwoven network. In this exhibition, mesh represents a non-chronological, non-linear mode of sharing information.
Feminist practices can usefully be understood as an expansive network of counter-hegemonic resistance; they work to disrupt, dismantle, and reimagine the existing status quo. Plural and intersectional, feminist practices value multiplicity, rejecting the idea of a universal perspective. Institutions such as libraries, archives and museums are governed by certain systems for organising knowledge, and feminist practices involve disrupting these systems to understand what we are prioritising, and why.
In Enmeshed, artists Julia Holderness, Areez Katki, Erica van Zon, Ana Iti, and Claudia Kogachi each reframe narratives, whether they be personal, cultural, or archival. Stories are rewritten from new perspectives, engaging with plurality, temporality, and embodiment – principles that reject a chronological or linear approach. Archival truths are questioned, and personal histories are entwined with fictions. Engaging with narratives born from archives, films, popular culture and personal histories, these artists retell their chosen stories from a feminist perspective. They critique the frameworks taken for granted as being ‘neutral’ by challenging prescribed structures of organising knowledge to alter how people discover, engage with and interpret narratives.
For further information about the exhibition: www.ashburtonartgallery.org.nz
To enquire about works by Erica van Zon: info@melanierogergallery.com
