09 Nov 2010
Scheduled Entertainment
Geoffrey Heath
17 November–19 December 2010
Opening preview: Tuesday 16 November 2010, 5.30pm
Artist talk: Wednesday 17 November 2010, 5.30pm
Geoffrey Heath is well known for offering his vision of everyday life back to us for our contemplation. Often using suburbia as a backdrop, Heath’s unromanticised view of life is simultaneously humorous yet soberingly confrontational in its directness. Heath’s photographic images possess both a personal and universal appeal in his painstaking recreation of the everyday, and draw on the stockpile of memories and dreams, of personal experience and popular culture, that exist within us all.
Heath’s new works—like the exhibition title suggests—address a broad range of ritualistic leisure activities with a cynical yet humorous eye. These include Christmas, the office party, music lessons, the six o’clock news, infomercials, and our obsession with celebrity. From the banal to the startling and surreal, these images establish this artist’s unique viewpoint, and act as a penetrating memory trigger for a wide audience.
My intention is to create images that leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Images that are strongly resonant of everyday life, but like moments from a film, continue to stay with you, long after the final credits have rolled.
Additional support for Geoffrey Heath’s new works for this exhibition was generously granted to the artist by Creative New Zealand.
For further information on this exhibition please contact The Physics Room on +64 3 379 5583 or email physicsroom@physicsroom.org.nz
Dancing Celestial
Sriwhana Spong
17 November–19 December 2010
Opening preview: Tuesday 16 November 2010, 5.30pm
Artist talk: Wednesday 17 November 2010, 5.30pm
Dancing Celestial is a 12th century Indian sandstone sculpture of a dancing woman. Artefact L.1993.88.2, it is the Promised Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Dancing Celestial was photographed at the museum in June 2010, as part of a new work planned for The Physics Room. However the film was accidently exposed by airport scanners, causing the image to completely disappear.
Dancing Celestial now frames new works; a dance barre to support the body, a clothing rack to hang your jacket on. Objects that hint at everyday movements and esoteric gestures. Objects haunted by the possibility of movement and action. Each piece is made up of components cast from open moulds; brackets and coathangers that are articulated only on one side, their other half lost in the process of replication. A series of collages
present images of Bronslava Nijinska’s Les Noces, Lucia Joyce, and a dancer dressed as Kikimora, from the 1910 Ballet Russe dance of the same name. The collages, created by identical images found in different books, reveal historical documents that morph and change according to different contexts. These book pages, held between sheets of glass, allow the gallery wall and the frames own method of hanging to be apparent. Different walls, other homes, or a gallery storeroom create new backgrounds for these images of dancing women to rest against.
Between the historical documents, artefacts in museums, and “beyond the political speeches, magazine advertisements, letters and music that traditionally compose our view of the past are exuberantly physical beings”. Dancing Celestial hints at the past gestures of female artists, whilst at the same time offering objects that could be used in the current moment. Dancing Celestial presents the viewer with the potential for action, creating a space between things, a space latent with the potential for various meanings to be formed and movements to be made.
For further information on this exhibition please contact The Physics Room on +64 3 379 5583 or email physicsroom@physicsroom.org.nz
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