Aroha Novak and Elise O'Neill: Expensive Rubbish | Elspeth Fougere: Here, There and Everywhere (We are a Community of Cells) | 1 Dec 09 - 24 Dec 09

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The Blue Oyster is pleased to present Elise O'Neill and Aroha Novak | Expensive Rubbish and Elspeth Fougere | Here, There and Everywhere (We are a Community of Cells). Using handmade and recycling methods O'Neill, Novak and Fougere are part of an international resurgence of a craft and do-it-yourself ethos, which has grown in response to current economic and environmental conditions. The exhibitions will open on Tuesday 1 December at 5:30pm and run until 24 December.

For Expensive Rubbish Elise O'Neill and Aroha Novak present handmade military and consumer items which have been constructed from recycled materials. They explore the way these products feed off capitalist narratives of fear and desire. Underlying their work is a critique of consumer fetishism and media sensation which negates, obscures and denies the socially and environmentally destructive forces at play behind these systems. Their work creates a dialogue between both personal expense and governmental expense, questioning the viability and longevity of either.

O'Neill's oversized home appliances, handmade from recycled cardboard and newspaper, invert the throw-away mentality of consumer culture. Their overbearing size evokes childhood, when normal things are bigger than we are. With the promotion of excessive lifestyles and continual growth as valid economic models, our throw-away mentality is one our children may come to resent us for.  This global concern is brought back to Dunedin through the local newspaper covering the surfaces, noisily juxtaposing trivial gossip with issues of great significance or consequence.
Novak's child-size military vehicles allude to the way war is fantasised, flattened and re-packaged through media depictions.  Using the lens of a child’s perception of reality to emphasise our inability to grasp and even access the complexity and consequences of international politics and war when obscured by propoganda and media sensation. Novak has created a fragile fantasy world from recycled materials - cardboard boxes and fluffy fabrics, reducing cities and weapons of mass destruction to playthings.

Ultimately, both O’Neill and Novak use a child's viewpoint as a lens for viewing and evaluating the impact current choices will have on the next generation and the burden of debt, hostility and environmental degradation, which they will inherit.

Elspeth Fougere's Here, There and Everywhere (We are a Community of Cells) begins with a mass of woollen crochet spirals, a caricature collection of cells. These handmade forms are playfully taken out into the landscape, placed onto bodies and into environments in storytelling performance activations with others. The encounters are photographically documented as drawings of events, forming trace histories of relationships between the body, the self and life experience.  The dialogue she initiates with her activators during the process orientates them towards reflecting on their influences growing up, and their sense of embodiment, searching for the life skills that carry us forward in a sustainable relationship with the environment.

Fougere is trying to tap our potential as performing bodies, inviting her participants to explore the inheritance we carry with us wherever we go, in our cells and DNA. This inheritance is information about our past - stories, interactions and residual life skills and knowledge passed on - which can help us exist responsively,  responsibly and creatively in whatever landscape we are in, along with whatever resources or industries are physically passed on to us.  Woolcraft is one stream of knowledge that Fougere herself, as a Pakeha artist, has inherited, one which she seeks to share and reinvigorate.

Every Saturday from 12 - 3 Fougere and collaborators will run free open workshop craft sessions inviting participants to help grow the colony of woollen cells, or to use the space as a place to mingle and work together with other local crafters. Through freely sharing wool craft knowledge, all the stories and laughter that goes along with learning to crochet and the final creations, the cells and the stories they carry will spread out from the gallery and into Dunedin. Her strategy of gathering people together for the exchange of objects, skills, resources and stories in the gallery space, captures core philosophy of the contemporary craft resurgence.