The moon and the pavement is an exhibition by The Physics Room in collaboration with Ashburton Art Gallery. The exhibition takes an extreme close-up perspective on materials and surfaces from both the urban and natural Hakatere Ashburton environment and beyond.

Looking down at the coarse pavement or at your smooth backlit phone while walking has become a common habit. These surfaces have come to condition the way our bodies move through the world: feet on the ground, head in the internet. In this exhibition, commonplace materials and surfaces are examined with an intensity of focus revealing that this is a moving planet we are walking on, alive with its own forces and interactions.

Each artist in the show relies on found, industrially sourced and digital materials to make their work.

For Teresa Collins this means combing streets for discarded things, collected and secured into suspended mobiles that hang low in the gallery space.

Yukari Kaihori’s work is also made with scavenged materials: glass tiles made from recycled glass from Hakatere Ashburton region and ceramic tiles glazed with ash from a gallery worker’s home fireplace.

Sam Towse’s sculptures are like small-scale memorials to what the urban site inevitably suppresses beneath it, or crude human-made fossils. They are reminders that the surface of a city is in no way seamless; rather, its ‘skin’ craters, ruptures, and flakes like any other ageing body.

Susu’s work brings the body into focus through its interaction with other things in the world. A projected video falls onto the floor, so that we look into it from above. Subtitles encircle the image so there is no fixed point from which to read.

This exhibition asks that we move with a different kind of awareness, attentive to both the everyday earthy matter that surrounds us, and to more feral, queer, or space-bound fantasies. The moon and the pavement also reminds us of the non-human and geological activity that animates the earth: the silveries that used to come rushing down the Hakatere awa each August. Volcanic eruptions ninety million years ago causing the formation of agates, chalcedony and quartz, and over two millions years ago, the advancing and retreating glaciers in the Hakatere Ashburton region leaving vast slopes of shingle residue. Each of these movements leaves a material record, which is also a narrative: a riverbed, a pavement, an agate, the moon.

The moon and the pavement is a continuation of The Physics Room's itinerant programme collaborating with public galleries across Te Waipounamu. This is the second partnership exhibition between the Ashburton Art Gallery and The Physics Room.

The exhibition will be opening Friday 12 August at 6pm with talks by the artists.

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