My First Apple Collective
10 – 28 June 2009
Opening preview: Wednesday 10 June 5.30 – 7.30pm
Exhibition Statement:
“Youth how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! A book of beginnings, a story without end, each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!” My First Apple is a head on collision of fresh emergent art. Three female artists apply playful themes to object, illustration and photography, with underlying currents of cultural integration, masculine error and creatures from under your bed!
Artist Statement – Waimatao:
“Ko Te Arawa toku iwi Ko Ngati Tuara Ngati Kea ko Ngati Pikiao tõku hapu Ko Kearoa tõku marae Ko Waimatao tõku ingoa” Waimatao is based in Wellington, a magnetic pole between her Northern heritage and her Southern upbringing. This physical distance allows her to look at both in retrospect. Waimatao’s sculptural work explores issues concerning ethnicity, culture, assimilation versus integration and the elusive animal ‘the New Zealander’. Deconstructing traditional techniques in binary with modern materials, Waimatao constructs creatures that bend ethnographic standards. “Using sculpture, I work through my personal concerns and critiques of past and present cultural relations here in New Zealand”.
Artist Statement – Gemma Duncan:
As a Wellington-based artist, Gemma Duncan finds inspiration in her New Zealand surroundings, namely her family and the fallacies of stereotyping everyday New Zealand culture. “I’m fascinated by the uncanny found in the ‘norm’, the dirt and the sweat…the darker narratives you will find in your mundane surroundings if you look hard enough”. Her practice is consistently rooted in moving-image, but as an exception, she also uses photography as a media to line ideas against each other for your scrutiny. Featured in My First Apple is a photographic series documenting artefacts collected by her father, a ‘happy meal’ packed with ideas polarising ideas, female fantasy raised by masculine error.
Artist Statement – Siana Butterfield:
They live under your bed, in your head and hide in your wardrobe. Raised in quiet suburbia, natural environments and imagination have become the foundations for how I create art. Always having an interest in drawing and abstracting objects, the illustrations in My First Apple explore how childhood notions and fears can develop into affectionate memories. Overtime these once fearful yet trivial creatures become distorted in vitro by the human mind.