Worlds teeming with dramatic rituals…[1]

Sparkling and heady new rites, whether initatiatory, propitiary or funerary appear throughout the work of Richard Orjis. Cycles of growth and decay are manifest throughout idiosyncratic ceremonies captured in large, rich, alluring, colourful and slick photographic prints.

Orjis’ quest is to explore the latent meanings contained within a host of different materials in the hope that they might somehow be transcended. This shaman-like exploration involves careful placement and varied lighting techniques so that each potent material contributes its own colour, texture, sensation and takes its place (usually before a black background) within an iconography of spiritual substances. The hothouse perfection of lurid flowers is combined with the wilderness of dandelions, grasses, and weeds. Anything which could possibly be white or bright is also displayed: bones, dough, bedsheets, clay, smoke, snow, flour, stars, porcelain, plaster and crystal. Soil, mud and coal-dust reappear, as do ferocious dogs and android-like golden figures. Dazzling jewels, tinsel wigs, precious metals and stones are also included within Orjis’ contemporary rituals.

Within the controlled environment of the studio, installations and tableaux are carefully constructed by Orjis. A particular sort of portraiture sees young men impossibly bedecked with cascades of exotic and overbred flowers, becoming a unique sort of hybrid-floral-still-life. Auspicious arrangements of bones and candles combine with doughy terrains to create a melange of landscape and genre-painting. More recently bejewelled flowers have featured beside andriod-like figures wrought from multiple layers of photographs of bevelled gemstones, gold-plated links and shiny stremer wigs. These large-scale scenarios are built layer by layer with a combination of photography and digital manipulation. Initial photographs of objects are cut, spliced and super-imposed in order to create images heavy with excess, overflowing with intricate and interweaving details.

Orjis has also been known to photograph meadows filled with flowers and in 2010 initiated a public art project at Te Tuhi where a druidic circle of lawn was allowed to grow freely into a patch of wild grasses and flowers. His practice is an alternation between growth and the inert, nature and artifice, ritual and the banal. Ever-present is an ecclesiastic delight in the rarefied and toxic as well as the savage, tenebrous, slightly disturbing and sublime.

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Richard Orjis (b. 1979)  lives and works in Auckland and completed his Masters at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2006. He has exhibited extensively within local and international in artist-run spaces, private galleries and public institutions. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: Salt Felix (Melanie Roger Gallery, 2017), The Apron (Tauranga Art Gallery public project, 2016); Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Melanie Roger Gallery & Sarjeant Gallery, 2015), Home (Corbans Estate Arts Centre, 2014), Walking in Trees (Auckland Council Pop Project, 2014) Richard Orjis: So Give me The Night (Papakura Art Gallery, 2012), of quiet volcanoes (Melanie Roger Gallery, 2012), Fields (McNamara Gallery, Whanganui, 2011) Grass Circle (Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland, 2010 - 2012) , Silver Park (High Street Project, Christchurch, 2010) My Empire of Dirt (Roger Williams Contemporary, 2009). He has been included in group exhibitions within New Zealand and internationally and in 2014 was part of a major collaborative exhibition "We are but Dust and Shadow" with Tessa Laird and Tiffany Singh at Melanie Roger Gallery.  This was also the year he was the Tylee Cottage Artist in Residence at the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui.  In 2017 he was the Asia New Zealand Foundation artist in residence at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia. Orjis’ work is held in private and public collections including: The University of Auckland, the Jenny Gibbs Collection (Auckland), the University of Auckland (Auckland), Auckland Council (Auckland), The Film Archive (Wellington), The Wallace Trust collection (Auckland) and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport Collection (Madrid, Spain). His work to date was the subject of a monograph Park in 2012 and he is regularly included in art publications both nationally and internationally including Art New Zealand, Art and Australia and White Fungus.  

For additional information and a complete CV please contact the gallery.

[1] Tessa Laird ‘The botany of desire: Richard Orjis’ Gardens of Earthly Delight’ in Art & Australia Vol. 49 No. 1 Spring 2011.