Freedom (Digital Exhibition) - Te Aro Winery 

The Nomadic Art Gallery's exhibition at the Urban Winery 'Te Aro' is the second in a series of related exhibitions organised throughout the Capital of New Zealand. By means of different artists and artistic media, these in-a-row exhibitions critically explore different aspects and consequences of freedom while uncovering essential aspects of our existence as human beings.

Therefore, to celebrate our anxious existence, we invite you to taste away your worries with natural and lo-fi wines while immersing in a performance by poet Rhys Feeney along side mesmerizing moving image artwork by Miranda Bellamy. This eclectic ensemble of visuals, smells and eloquence pushes spectators to think about the socio-ecological cost of freedom and question (y)our idea of free will, self-determination and the extent to which our freedom is conditioned by personal wishes, passions, fears and desires. Both artists respond to a growing urge for art that adresses the roles of consumption and the excesses of globalisation in shaping our projected ideal of freedom.

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Rhys Feeney is a British born poet and teacher living and working in Wellington. Apart from teaching the beauty of the English language, Rhys also writes poems to forget about his angst and sense of dislocation in the eyes of consumerism and climate change. Often merging the highly personal with the bleakly generic, his poems seek to understand the apathies and oxymorons plaguing the 21st Century's individual.

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Miranda Bellamy is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in New Zealand. Her versatile work critically reflects on expectation, doom and our growing sense of (dis)location. By juxtaposing our saturated image terrain with natural and artificial processes and objects, the artist allows the spectator to traverse mediums and contexts. In her changing practise there is one common thread: to confront us with the current socio-ecological reality that threatens and deteriorates our existence.

 

List of screened videographic work

 

• Avail (2011) – New Zealand – 12min24sec

 

As if looking through a microscope the spectator is drawn to mesmerizing colour-changing processes taking place on the surface of a soap bubble. Waves of blue, orange and red swirl right and left, up and down carrying our thoughts to the bigger picture: a series of climatological events. When looking at the ephemeral bubbles, radiating a sort of heat, one can only think of the rapid changing of our environment, slowly pushing us to the brink of perishment.

 

• Meme (2011) – New Zealand – 24sec (looped) – Digital video and sound

 

Akin to a kinetic photograph rythmically displaying the vibrant night activity around the drive-in of a McDonalds. The endless loop of going in and out represents the emptiness of mass-consumerism and its devestating effects for our socio-ecological infrastructure.

 

• Carte Blanche (2011) – New Zealand – 1min5sec (looped)-  Digital video and sound

 

A maquette airplane is, in a meditative flow, perpetually descending in a New Zealand native forest. While the title translates as “total freedom”, the images that follow tell us something different: how can something be both a symbol for progress as for destruction? Reminiscent of the captivating Koyaanitsqi-trilogy, this paradoxical short film shows how freedom gets twisted when environments are being eroded by industry.

 

Credits: Audio production by Chris Miller / Made with support of the Southland Art Foundation

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