2008 Programme

Intertidal
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The Blue Oyster Gallery's last exhibition for 2008 will be a solo show of the work by Dunedin artist, Mike Cooke, titled  "Thunder Head and Rainbow Face".
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When artists are asked to respond 'in a psychic way’ to a site, city or idea, what can we expect?  In this case, 13 artists have made work for the Blue Oyster Gallery in response to ‘The Blue Room’, a famous house in Dunedin where Spiritualists conducted séances in the 1920s. Some are skeptics, some believers, but all have made work that raises questions about the fascination with the psychic that haunts us now. The television programmes, the internet sites devoted to spells and spectres, the touring psychics, what are we to make of it all?’
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Reworking family portraits with textile interventions, Caroline McQuarrie's We Hold Back The Night probes the ideologies represented by our domestic documentation of times gone by. Questioning both the social construction of house as ‘home’ and the phoniness of the standard smiley ‘family’ photo Caroline McQuarrie draws attention to the artificial memorialisation of these moments. But all is not doom and gloom. McQuarrie’s playful use of domestic arts and crafts is nostalgic and celebratory, prompting memories that help us form our own ‘stories’, she explains.“It is believed that the experience of shaping our own story becomes what is truth for us in our memories. The story we tell does not simply re-play old memories; it is constructed from the point of view of now and how we connect and explain through this. The story of our identity changes as we grow and gather experience”
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Engaging recycled domestic materials in a response to the utilitarian attachments of the Blue Oyster, Margaret Dawson’s Ducters and Muses induces a searching, looking and peering action she associates with photography. The original planned structure, a room to room suspended sinewy sculpture, is more fragile and fragmented due to the demise of the chief Ducter, the head engineer: the late John Dean.
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Auckland artist Read uses the play between text and objects to portray a certain melancholy in her mixed media installation The Barge and the Bear, reflecting on the idea that life is absurd in a purposeless chaotic universe. Naïve yet poetic sculptures teamed with photographs and text, let the viewer search for something logical in a collection of things which have been left behind in an experiment but it will be unclear of what kind. Read describes The Barge and the Bear with this quote by Rebecca Solnit: “It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.”
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Melbourne based artist Carmel Cosgrove grapples with issues of private and displaced spaces in her multi media installation Uninvited.
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Jason Secto's MODERNLOVE explores the paradigms of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and cloning- specifically in the area of 'in vitro fertilisation'. It questions what effects introduced nanoparticles will have within the Human or Animal body. The painting process is an automatic one (re Du Champ) and is produced without using stencils or preliminary sketches, requiring a constant cross-referencing of 'Icon' (both form and content). This forces the mind to help evolve the subject matter, as would a computer program or hypothetical electrical exchange in graphic terms. Loss and mutation of content are the only constants in the process.
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Hilton's Post Modern T-Shirt Sale transforms the usually non-commercial environment of the Blue Oyster's Upper Gallery into retail bliss- a CLEARANCE SALE! Visitors are invited to browse the racks of t-shirts brandishing lofty postmodern slogans with the finesse of a bumper sticker and make purchases on the night at the drastically reduced rate of $15. Each t-shirt features Nick Spratt's unique Liberate Freedom font. The sale runs for one night only, t-shirts will return to their original price of $75 after opening night. Women's and Men's sizes are available.
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Oettli’s work is a bizarre take on the traditional genre of portraiture, used to expose his belief in the redundancy of men in the modern world. His MEN are images discarded by others, remnants collected from recycled paper bins. The results are printed using an engineer's plotter producing large colour portraits that are then anonymously typecast “Bachelorman” “Lonelyman”...
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The Blue Oyster Performance Art Series was held for the second time as a part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival for a week in May 2008. Each Performer was chosen by the curator to cover a different aspect of Performance Art Practice. We had eight artists come from New Zealand and Australia to perform. There were performances held in the Blue Oyster Gallery, at the University of Otago and around the streets of Dunedin so there was a wide audience covered during the week. The performances held in the gallery were mostly attended by our usual Blue Oyster community – the longer performances such as Sach Catts and Pippa Sanderson giving the audience the opportunity to come and go as they pleased. The artist talks in the gallery were intimate and conversational which we found were beneficial for the artists being able to get direct feedback from the audience.
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Victoria Chidley, Kirsty Cameron & Daisy Jackson: Little Lost Boys is an An exhibition of photography and film by Auckland artists. Set in the environments of dark suburbia the exhibition was a seductive and introspective exploration of voyeurism; its narratives ambiguous and uncertain; alluding to strange fantasies and internal worlds.
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Aroha Novak, Jenna Todd, Alissia Holzer & Aliki Boufis.
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Alannah Brown was born and raised in Clyde, Central Otago. Drink your Medicine combines nostalgia for an idyllic rural upbringing with the hard realities of farming and growing up. “Drink your medicine” is the forceful command given to a child by a parent who knows what is best. The farmer, however, is driven not so much by compassion but the need to produce healthy livestock in order to earn a living. After all at the end of the day the animals will usually be sold or slaughtered and it is best not to form emotional attachments. Brown’s paintings combine to create a disconcerting body of work. The viewer is pulled in different directions, experiencing guilt/pleasure, delight/disgust, attraction/repulsion, familiarity/ unfamiliarity, fantasy/fiction.
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