Gus Fisher Gallery ends the year with a suite of solo presentations by emerging Tāmaki Makaurau based artists Christian Dimick, Dayle Palfreyman and Peter Simpson. Through painting, installation and film, each artist transforms the gallery’s three main spaces through considered and contrasting approaches.

Exploring aspects of tracing and revealing, Christian Dimick presents a series of paintings in the dome gallery. The works signal a new painterly direction in Dimick’s improvisatory practice. Calico is utilised by the artist for its ability to retain marks and imprints after layers of the paint are removed from the work, leaving the viewer with only fragments of a once panoptic picture. These works attempt to visualise the physical impossibility of retaining our dreams, memories and thoughts with clarity. Here, Dimick explores painting as an open ended and ongoing exchange; narratives are disrupted and thoughts are intercepted by the action of painting. A line, a dream, a layer—each are made visible through the treatment of surface, texture and space.

Dayle Palfreyman has worked collaboratively with artists Cello Forrester and Henrietta Fisher to produce a sound and moving image work. The installation is sited in Gallery 2 which formerly functioned as a women’s bathroom and changing room during the building’s broadcasting era. In the work Palfreyman reinterprets the Scottish folk myth of the Kelpie: a shape-changing aquatic creature that can appear on land as a horse. This area of Palfreyman’s practice draws our attention to bio-relations, seen here through the partnership between humans and our equine companions. Framed through a feminine lens, the film examines how myth shapes an understanding of desire, grief, and the elusive nature of ‘truth’.

Peter Simpson presents a new site-responsive installation which explores the material histories of objects and architecture. I am free because of an open-plan kitchen is an installation made of three components: the gallery space itself, two kauri doors sourced from a villa near Maungawhau (Mt Eden), and kōwhaiwhai painted on the kauri doors by the artist. Through their intertwinement, the components reflect the different types of status assigned to objects when subject to Coloniality. The room is an object of property comprised of a multitude of non-human objects that perform the labour that such a space requires. The two kauri doors have been liberated from similar roles and now carry out the labour that an artwork demands. The kōwhaiwhai activates a Māori perspective, allowing us to view these non-human objects as more than their prescribed object status allows.

Newly commissioned texts by Gabi Lardies, Samuel Te Kani and Shannon Te Ao respond to each of the artists presentations.

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