The first exhibition of the season at Tutere Gallery on the Waikanae beachfront opened today and your editors went along to have a look. “Waste Not is an exhibition exploring unusual materials and our perceptions to them” and features work by Johannes Mueller-Welschof (as the name suggests, he is originally from Germany) and Rebecca Spinks. The exhibition runs to Sunday 29 September.
We thought it could almost be subtitled “50 Shades of Grey” as there is very little colour other than what is on the continuum from white to black.
Anyway, here are the artists’ own descriptions, taken from the Tutere Gallery website:
Johannes says:
“The selection of works I am presenting in “Waste Not…” are the result of an ongoing intense but playful exploration of materials and items that are generally considered waste or of low value. For this project landfill shops proved to be my main source of material, inspiration and advice.
By re-setting my focus on the pure materiality and the surprising beauty of these waste products, I am inviting the viewer to do the same. I am attempting to challenge our perception of items that are a common part of daily life but tend to go unnoticed and ones that you certainly wouldn’t appreciate as having aesthetic merit.
Resourcefulness and sustainability is also explored with underlying themes of communication, individualism and community.
Accompanying the sculptural installations and objects, are a series of digitally edited, rather “kaleidoscope-y” photographic works; an expression of my fascination with transparency, reflection and symmetry.”
Rebecca Says:
“Waste Not…explores themes of loss of information and the unreliability of memory. I am particularly interested in the ephemeral nature of information and how it can become lost, distorted and disjointed over time.
Our tendency as a throw-away society also has an effect on how information is retained. Many things are now only kept for a very short period of time before they are discarded for the latest form of technology. VHS videotape is one such form of technology which has been replaced with digital storage devices. The information stored on these videotapes, once considered important enough to be recorded, has now been forgotten and discarded.
This discarding of stored information means the memory of a particular event can get fractured and it becomes unreliable as time goes on. By stretching and distorting, deconstructing and reconstructing the VHS videotape I am interweaving a new narrative out of the old stories they contain.
How can we be sure that the things we remember are in fact what actually occurred?