3-22 October
Föenander Gallery presents a dual exhibition from two New Zealand artists, Michael Dell and Monique Lacey.
Featured artwork: Michael Dell, ‘Roadside Landscape / Moutere Highway’; Monique Lacey, ‘Terms of Entanglement’
Michael Dell | Backlit Fields
Michael Dell’s paintings shift from subject to non-subject, from representation to abstraction, where both modes of visual discourse reveal an evident attention to materiality and the static tension between picture surface and picture depth. Backlit Fields is a continuation of that studio practice.
This exhibition, consisting of predominately landscape work is based from an ongoing observation of certain locations from the rural outskirts of Whakatū Nelson, where he lives. These paintings are based on roadside views from the Moutere Highway and the Takaka Valley. Through photographing these locations and using the images as a reference point, he physically appropriates the camera’s gaze, reducing the images to a visual perception of a view, or scene, by painting them. Any formal relationship between the photograph and the painting becomes more disproportional through Dell’s studio process, in his thinking and choice of materials.
Monique Lacey | Truth Untold
Monique Lacey practice finds an initial footing in Minimalism. While her work embraces the manufactured, utilitarian materials of the world as found objects, there is an emphatic emphasis on interventions as a maker. Her practice utilises apparently destructive gestures in order to create the work, and may offer a playful critique of Minimalism and it’s tensions between surface and form, image and object—collapsing the distinction between sculpture and painting.
Lacey’s works begin with new commercial packaging materials purchased at local hardware stores which offer structural givens of both volume and surface. These flat-packed materials are assembled and then covered with plaster, paint, resin, rubber, wax, varnish and pigments which act as both binding agents and new surfaces to conceal or reveal the structure underneath.
