Christina Read: The Barge and the Bear | Kate Woods: Trouble Everyday

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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.”

Kate Woods' Trouble Everyday sources ‘found’ printed images and contain ‘found’ artworks from the 60s/70s Earthwork era. In Trouble Everyday the photographs and paintings all portray watery landscapes. Icebergs in strange places and ‘found’ Land Art submerged in familiar looking scenes like National Geographic images gone wrong. The exhibition is based on an interest in the documentary photography of 70s Land Art sculptures in the way some tend to give the sense of a non-space, or at least a space that can never be physically accessed, as it may not exist anymore. Some of the works are also an unsubtle nod to the title Trouble Everyday and the now widely recognised detrimental changes to the earth due to human actions.