Archived: Three Approaches, Three Rooms

Gus Fisher Gallery is ending 2024 with a suite of solo presentations by emerging Tāmaki Makaurau based artists Christian Dimick, Dayle Palfreyman and Peter Simpson. Through painting, installation and film, each artist transforms the gallery’s three main spaces through considered and contrasting approaches.

Exploring aspects of tracing and revealing, Christian Dimick presents a series of paintings in the dome gallery. The works signal a new painterly direction in Dimick’s improvisatory practice. These works attempt to visualise the physical impossibility of retaining our dreams, memories and thoughts with clarity.

Dayle Palfreyman has worked collaboratively with artists Cello Forrester and Henrietta Fisher to produce a sound and moving image work. In the work Palfreyman reinterprets the Scottish folk myth of the Kelpie: a shape-changing aquatic creature that can appear on land as a horse. This area of Palfreyman’s practice draws our attention to bio-relations, seen here through the partnership between humans and our equine companions.

Peter Simpson presents a new site-responsive installation which explores the material histories of objects and architecture. I am free because of an open-plan kitchen is an installation made of three components: the gallery space itself, two kauri doors sourced from a villa near Maungawhau (Mt Eden), and kōwhaiwhai painted on the kauri doors by the artist. Through their intertwinement, the components reflect the different types of status assigned to objects when subject to Coloniality. The kōwhaiwhai activates a Māori perspective, allowing us to view these non-human objects as more than their prescribed object status allows.

This exhibition runs until 07 December 2024.