The Imaginary Museum: exhibition

Showing posts with label exhibition. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

HAUNTS Launch / Emma Smith Exhibition - 5-6/10/24

Emma Smith: "The second sun" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024)
[images courtesy of the artist]

Bronwyn Lloyd will be hosting an exhibition
of recent paintings
by Emma Smith
at 6 Hastings Road
Mairangi Bay, Auckland
Saturday-Sunday 5-6 October
from 11am-4pm

Jack Ross's new collection of stories
Haunts (Lasavia Publishing)
will be launched on the Saturday at 2pm
$30 cash or bank deposit (no EFTPOS)

ALL WELCOME

Refreshments provided

updates on Instagram: @lloyd.bronwyn

Emma Smith: "Living with caves" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024)

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Haunts (Lasavia Publishing, 2024)
Image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) / Design: Daniela Gast

Back cover blurb:
What do we actually mean by the word haunt? In this new set of stories inspired by the term, Jack Ross invokes a series of his favourite haunts via voices from the past, beginning with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and concluding with Emanuel Swedenborg.
In between he visits with Irish ghost-story maestro Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, along with others ranging from James Joyce to H. P. Lovecraft – not to mention Scheherazade herself, creator / narrator of The 1001 Nights.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, he tries to settle accounts with his own father, the architect of a vast entangled empire of native bush and weeds at the back of their suburban quarter-acre section in Mairangi Bay.
The book ends with the novella Cartographies of the Afterlife, an exploration of the penumbra between life and death, based on accounts from recent visitors.
In the immortal words of Bette Davis: ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.’

Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His previous collection, Ghost Stories (Lasavia, 2019), has been prescribed for writing courses at three local universities. He’s also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including (most recently) Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems (2023).

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Emma Smith: "The second to last" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024)

Artist's statement:
'Years ago, I lived in a downstairs flat with wide windows that let the night right into the room. There were white datura flowers with pink throats on the fence line. They hummed at dusk. For a long time I tried to paint them as they seemed utterly their own thing. The blooms became sails, became tents, ripped tarps, ropes whipping, planes noses, thick smoke, drones, white flags, stadium lights, search lights, anxious lanterns, distant fires, phosphorescence from below. These shapes still resist a final form and so too do the conditions about them. They are in scorched fields, floating in the dead air of space and falling in fiery plumes.’

Emma Smith was born in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa/ New Zealand in 1975. Smith currently teaches Contemporary Arts at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland. Further information can be found at her website https://emmasmithtingrew.wordpress.com/.

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Graham Fletcher: Ceramic Head
[photo: Bronwyn Lloyd (4-10-24)

Jack & Bronwyn at the Haunts / Municipal Gardens launch
[photo: Viv Stone (5-10-24)

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Friday, July 13, 2012

Korero

Korero (12 July-2 August, 2012)

Korero is a "collaborative exhibition illustrating a fusion between visual art and poetry. 20 artists from various disciplines select from 20 carefully chosen poems on the theme of conversation, to use as inspiration for their artwork. The artists include Ingrid Anderson, Lisa Benson, Kirsty Black, Chris Dennis, Sue Dick, Matt Moriarty, Dom Morrison, Emily Pauling, Clinton Philips, Kirsten Pleitner, Ramon Robertson, Mark Russell, Kate Sellar, Brendon Sellar, Shona Tawhiao, Emma Topping, Wayne Trow, Jana Wood and Nicola Wright."

One of the poems chosen for the exhibition by Siobhan Harvey and Melissa Elliot, the curators, was my piece "Except Once":

– Aren’t I always nice to you?
– Except once.
[Overheard in the Massey @ Albany Refectory]

tap’s still dripping, diesel generators roar
in shop doors, no money rolls
in, lumps of old essay sag
in plastic bags – I type out texts
from Penguin Books of European Verse.
The water’s too cold
for swimming.

Focus on externals: tick of death
in Irene’s stomach, Miriel’s scorched flesh,
brain-clots and blood-diseases, Julian’s sister
killed on Saturday night – I like to see
the islands in the gulf, driving
down the long hill, ships floating
down the sky.

(17/3/98)

So, as a result, Bronwyn and I drove over to the Uxbridge Creative Arts Centre in Howick last night for the opening of the show. And I'm very glad we did. We got to catch up with a number of friends we hadn't seen for a while: Sarah Broom, Riemke Ensing and Sonja Yelich among them. And we also got to meet the artist who'd created a work based on my poem, Kirsty Black.

Here we are in front of her painting, also entitled "Except Once":

And here's a more detailed view of the painting itself:

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[Kirsty Black: Except Once]

[Except Once (detail)]

I guess I should explain that the poem was written during the great Auckland blackout of 1998, when "diesel generators" were indeed roaring "in shop doors" up and down Queen Street, and the only lights one could see in the darkened city were traffic red, orange, greens. It was a strange and uncanny time, and an appalling number of people I knew seemed to be in pain and turmoil just then. There's a bit of a lift at the end, though, which I feel that Kirsty has picked up on in her transition from the dark blue at the bottom of her painting to the lighter, more life-affirming colours at the top of the frame.

It was very interesting to discuss her intentions with the piece with her. All in all, though her painting didn't win the $1,000 prize, I think it was a thoroughly worthwhile experience. I guess that's why I'm looking so smug in the picture below:

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Jack & Bronwyn's Dunedin Adventure

The view from my brother Jim's window
(Opoho, North East Valley, Dunedin)

I've just spent five days in Dunedin, attending the launch (on Tuesday 19th June) of the MOTH [Museum of True History] show "Fallen Empire" at the Blue Oyster Gallery.

We had a really nice time! The weather was practically perfect (despite various naysaying weather prophets). We hung out with my brother Jim; my niece Catherine; Karl Chitham, whose collection the exhibition came from (I edited the catalogue, and wrote an introduction to it); and also David Howard, my fellow executor of Leicester Kyle's literary estate, from whom I collected the remainder of Leicester's papers.

Here are some pictures - mostly taken by Bronwyn, hence her absence from them, but also a few by David Howard (marked DH), as well as some by my brother Jim (marked JR):