Crossings (a group show about intimacies and distances)
19.06.21-22.08.21
Curated by Christina Barton, Millie Riddell, and Sophie Thorn
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Wellington
http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/past-exhibitions/crossings/
Exhibition text:
Crossings began with a collaborative reflection on the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, far from the international epicentres of the virus, fear of the pandemic’s spread required us to stay home for a fortunately short period. In that time, the churn of modern living was momentarily paused. Briefly, we stopped to dwell inside our heads, bodies, houses, islands, with a new attentiveness. Illness and death were reported daily. An external and invisible threat entered our collective consciousness, spreading with it levels of anxiety: worries about dying, fear of financial ruin, heightened attention to hygiene, and nervousness around those outside our ‘bubble’. It was a strange state, at once alienating and claustrophobic, but also with a glimmer of something else: the simple pleasures of walking empty streets, the smell of baking bread, time’s new elasticity.
This is not, however, a show about the pandemic. It is a gathering of works brought together in the wake of that moment. These somehow embody and contend with the polarities that were awakened, but which have always existed: inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness, personal circumstances and larger conditions, life and death. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations, have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds. They present us with objects, images, words, and materials that articulate these states and serve as thresholds which carry us between them. As Susan Sontag once said, in writing about illness: ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship... Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
...
Among Rozana Lee’s vivid memories are those of her family’s textile shophouse in Aceh, Northern Sumatra, which was destroyed in the devastating tsunami that struck the region on Boxing Day in 2004. Since leaving Indonesia, spending time in Singapore, and eventually arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lee has taught herself the techniques of the Indonesian Batik tradition, to retain a connection to her past and the family members she lost, but also as a metaphor for the mobility and displacement that has marked her life to date.
For her installation at the Adam Art Gallery, Lee combines three of her characteristic fabric works – coloured cloth patterned with decorative designs and motifs applied with dyes and hot wax drawn onto the surface with a traditional pen-like tool called a Tjanting. These are hung on free-standing timber ‘frames’, with a short video of three more textiles she brought back from Indonesia.
These gently billow in the breeze in the garden of an abandoned house near her Auckland home to the natural sounds of the surroundings. Mixing Chinese silk satin, Islamic scroll patterning, exotic timber, indigenous botanicals, and the familiar outline of the iconic Hill’s Rotary Hoist clothesline, Lee suggests slippages between places and across space and time that mark her experiences as a migrant. She sees the contingency of this arrangement and the fluidity of the hot-wax patterns as signs of temporality and incompleteness but also of possibility. She deliberately fabricates a language of non-integration, drawing on histories of textile production and trade, to suggest the ‘in-between’ condition that is her and all displaced people’s experience.
Photos by Ted Whitaker, courtesy of Adam Art Gallery
19.06.21-22.08.21
Curated by Christina Barton, Millie Riddell, and Sophie Thorn
Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Wellington
http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/past-exhibitions/crossings/
Exhibition text:
Crossings began with a collaborative reflection on the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, far from the international epicentres of the virus, fear of the pandemic’s spread required us to stay home for a fortunately short period. In that time, the churn of modern living was momentarily paused. Briefly, we stopped to dwell inside our heads, bodies, houses, islands, with a new attentiveness. Illness and death were reported daily. An external and invisible threat entered our collective consciousness, spreading with it levels of anxiety: worries about dying, fear of financial ruin, heightened attention to hygiene, and nervousness around those outside our ‘bubble’. It was a strange state, at once alienating and claustrophobic, but also with a glimmer of something else: the simple pleasures of walking empty streets, the smell of baking bread, time’s new elasticity.
This is not, however, a show about the pandemic. It is a gathering of works brought together in the wake of that moment. These somehow embody and contend with the polarities that were awakened, but which have always existed: inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness, personal circumstances and larger conditions, life and death. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations, have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds. They present us with objects, images, words, and materials that articulate these states and serve as thresholds which carry us between them. As Susan Sontag once said, in writing about illness: ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship... Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
...
Among Rozana Lee’s vivid memories are those of her family’s textile shophouse in Aceh, Northern Sumatra, which was destroyed in the devastating tsunami that struck the region on Boxing Day in 2004. Since leaving Indonesia, spending time in Singapore, and eventually arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lee has taught herself the techniques of the Indonesian Batik tradition, to retain a connection to her past and the family members she lost, but also as a metaphor for the mobility and displacement that has marked her life to date.
For her installation at the Adam Art Gallery, Lee combines three of her characteristic fabric works – coloured cloth patterned with decorative designs and motifs applied with dyes and hot wax drawn onto the surface with a traditional pen-like tool called a Tjanting. These are hung on free-standing timber ‘frames’, with a short video of three more textiles she brought back from Indonesia.
These gently billow in the breeze in the garden of an abandoned house near her Auckland home to the natural sounds of the surroundings. Mixing Chinese silk satin, Islamic scroll patterning, exotic timber, indigenous botanicals, and the familiar outline of the iconic Hill’s Rotary Hoist clothesline, Lee suggests slippages between places and across space and time that mark her experiences as a migrant. She sees the contingency of this arrangement and the fluidity of the hot-wax patterns as signs of temporality and incompleteness but also of possibility. She deliberately fabricates a language of non-integration, drawing on histories of textile production and trade, to suggest the ‘in-between’ condition that is her and all displaced people’s experience.
Photos by Ted Whitaker, courtesy of Adam Art Gallery