Traces

Yueyun Song
Mark Antony Steelsmith
Tom Hoyle
Celia Walmsley

This group exhibition features works by Yueyun Song, Mark Antony Steelsmith, Celia Walmsley and Tom Hoyle; tracing explorations of the lived experience of memory and time through the intimate and familiar, the immediate and present.

Residue

Yueyun Song’s work Residue presents the familiar ritual of tea making and drinking - inviting the viewer to look afresh at the residue of this simple process. The ceramic cups are symbolic of a new start to Yueyun’s art and design path and this work explores the tensions embedded within a personal responsibility to ritual and tradition alongside a desire for growth and cultural exapnsion. Song proposes life as a chain of overlapping beginnings and endings posing questions about the lasting effects of one’s activity.

Ghosting 001

In his animated work Ghosting 001, Mark Antony Steelsmith explores memories and the nature of remembering as projected onto a familiar landscape. Steelsmith’s animation repeats and re-explores a small section of the Wellington cityscape. Notions of the real and self-made mythologies compete in this space. Steelsmith plays in-between alienation and comfort in the reworked landscape. Narratives are suggested and then lost.

The Difference Between Wisdom and Madness

In his photographic work The Difference Between Wisdom and Madness, Tom Hoyle utilises the constraints of his camera equipment to extract small records of the endless drama between light and shadow. Amidst a roiling mass of contingent matter, momentary episodes of light may provide sublime clues towards the nature of existence. By isolating these episodes, the work removes all traces of the everyday—the de trop of things that photographs may commonly articulate—so that what is left might allow room for the contemplation of ideas big and small. One might be left to ponder why a line should be a line, whether a circle must be whole and how one might determine logic and perhaps even philosophy.

The Blue Dot

Celia Walmsley’s work The Blue Dot references the groundbreaking images of the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA) missions. Walmsley’s images explore the effects of scale in relation to the beliefs of human life. Within these images, recognisable patterns and images appear to repeat whether examining distant planets and galaxies or microscopic details found within nature. Whilst the repeating patterns provide some comfort, the infinite scale presents disquieting reality of our (in)significance.