Ocula Report Net Art's Archival Poetics at the New Museum 23 Feb 2019 : Banyi Huang for Ocula How should net art be classified, historicised, and exhibited, when time has elapsed between its initial production and its latter presentation? On view at the New Museum from 22 January to 26 May 2019, The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics presents 16 seminal artworks from Net Art Anthology, an ambitious two-year initiative undertaken...
Ocula Conversation Xi Bei Artistic Director, Times Art Center Berlin Times Art Center Berlin is a non-profit art institution located in the Potsdamer Strasse Art District of Berlin. It was founded in July 2018 by the Guangdong Times Museum, a non-profit private art museum in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China, making this the first parallel institution founded overseas by an Asia-based art museum. Its...
Ocula Report 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life 15 Feb 2019 : Natalie King for Ocula 'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...
Michael Lett opened in 2003. The gallery's focus has been on engaged, distinctive practices of both emerging and established artists making new work based (for the most part) within the Australasian region. The gallery represents a core group of artists and practitioners, however the program is also opened to allow opportunities for other artists (including those from Europe and America) on a project basis. In May 2014 Michael Lett moved to a new location. The gallery has two floors of exhibition space and is located in an elegant building, formerly a private bank, built in 1928 in Auckland’s central city.
Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11am - 6pm and Saturday, 11am - 3pm.
Richard FraterStop Shell (ghost fishing version), 2018 Modified recycled jacket; fishing nets and plastics retrieved from ocean; cray sh trap parts
Richard FraterStop Shell (oyster Filter version), 2017 Living oyster, Brita water Filter pitcher, modified oyster shell, marine aquarium, water pumps, chiller, bio-media filter, plexiglass
Richard FraterStop Shell (Live rock version), 2019 fossilised coral, 3D printed macroscopic graphs, coral organism, marine aquarium, bio-media, plexiglass
Henrik OlesenProduce 1, 2017 2 inch Phillips wood bullet screws, masking tape, Barge All Purpose Cement, Titebond polyurethane liquid glue on primed canvas
Ocula Report Melbourne Art Fair: ‘finding its political and global footing’ 9 Aug 2018 : Carol Que for Ocula The fifteenth edition of the biennial Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (2–5 August 2018), which returned after skipping its 2016 edition, was understated in its ground-level presentation. Forty participating galleries from across Australia, with the exception of eight spaces from New Zealand (including Two Rooms, Michael Lett and Bartley + Company Art) and...
Ocula Conversation Sriwhana Spong Artist Sriwhana Spong's first solo museum exhibition in New Zealand at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, a hook but no fish (12 May–22 July 2018), explored a unique language—the Lingua Ignota (Latin for 'unknown language')—used by a medieval female German mystic, abbess, composer, and writer Hildegard von Bingen. After its first showing in...
Ocula Report Auckland Art Exhibitions: The Lowdown 22 May 2018 : Anna Dickie for Ocula The time is ripe to galvanise New Zealand's public to more fully support its visual arts. With New Zealand-born artists like Simon Denny, Michael Stevenson and Francis Upritchard continuing to gain international acclaim, and a Turner Prize nominee in Luke Willis Thompson, the international art world is beginning to take notice of this small...
Ocula Conversation At the centre of Michael Stevenson's art practice is a sustained investigation into objects that give form and physical expression to broad ideological, economic and political forces. The New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist is known as a maker of detailed research-based sculptural installations. With characteristic dry wit and an acute eye for...
Related Press Secret Languages, Strangers' Houses, Snakes: On Sriwhana Spong Lucinda Bennett : 25 June 2018 What could a medieval female mystic have to offer a contemporary artist?Sriwhana Spong has seen a snake, befriended a rat, cast a spell for a critically endangered bird. She has engaged with all manner of living creatures in her work and yet her latest exhibition is titled for a lack of animal: a hook but no fish.For me, this is a foreboding...
Related Press Peter Stichbury’s ‘Outer Body’ Portraits EyeContact : 23 June 2018 Peter Stichbury's last portrait exhibition at Michael Lett's was of wonderfully delicate graphite drawings, but in this presentation he is back to his characteristically glowing, clean-faced, intensely psychological, painted heads. With a graphic flatness that links them to comic strip art, but with extraordinarily fine detail (such as precision...
Related Press Spong’s Polyphony - Sriwhana Spong: a hook but no fish, Govett Brewster Art Gallery
12 May–22 July 2018 Circuit : 20 June 2018 A warning, perhaps, for reviewers. On the second floor of the Govett Brewster large sheets of paper are lit by vivid red lights. In the gloom, we can make out semi-deconstructed poems and brief statements: coherent, unclear, clear – she / shallowness-depth-she / Less-less-than lack-she. The artwork is Bad Review (2018), and in it Sriwhana Spong has...
Related Press Zac Langdon-Pole named BMW Art Journey Award Winner Artforum : 14 June 2018 Art Basel announced that the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Zac Langdon-Pole has been named the next winner of the BMW Art Journey. An international jury unanimously selected Langdon-Pole from a shortlist of three artists whose works were exhibited in the Discoveries sector at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong.Langdon-Pole's installation at...
Related Video & Audio Secret languages - Sriwhana Spong Radio New Zealand : 6 May 2018 New Zealand/Balinese artist Sriwhana Spong's new exhibition in New Plymouthexplores a unique language used by a medieval female German mystic and abbess, Hildegard von Bingen. She's added some new elements to the show a hook but no fish, during her time as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's 2018 artist in residence since it was first shown in London...
Related Video & Audio Sriwhana Spong : ‘a hook but no fish' London Live : 10 January 2018 A new exhibition inspired by a secret 12th-century language created by a German mystic has opened in Battersea. Through her paintings, the artist Sriwhana Spong explores the relationship between language and sounds. Sriwhana Spong : a hook but no fish is on at the Pump House Gallery until April.
Related Video & Audio Making of the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio – Sriwhana Spong Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa : 8 September 2016 The Australian War Memorial invited five New Zealand and five Australian artists to each create an artistic response to World War I (1914–19). These videos record the responses, thoughts, working processes, and printmaking techniques of the ten artists as they develop their prints in dialogue with Australian master printmaker John Loane.
Related Video & Audio Here is the video for Martin Creed's 'Princess Taxi Girl Part 1' ARTNews : 17 July 2016 Today, the video for Martin Creed’s Princess Taxi Girl Part 1 was released, off of the artist and musician’s newest album, Thoughts Lined Up, which came out last week on Telephone Records. Creed’s balloon-heavy exhibition The Back Door is currently on view at New York’s Park Avenue Armory through August 7.
