New Work By Eve Armstrong, Dressed & Shaken

New Work By Eve Armstrong, Dressed & Shaken

Michael Lett is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Eve Armstrong, Dressed & Shaken . Eve works by extending, adapting, assisting, and facilitating exchanges of form and value. She operates these systems across various modes of practice, each differing slightly in expected formal outcome, yet with a recurring emphasis on transactional and functional processes. This underlying conceptual and operative framework provides the key to Armstrong’s ways of thinking and making.

Armstrong’s work is deceptively formal, yet hers is a formalism related to the materiality and function of each work’s constituent elements. There is a considered emphasis on colour, shape, location, anticipated social engagement, and effects on the overall desire for an energetic and intuitive mode of working which in the first instance appears to lack considered aesthetic intent, but allows for the impacts of formalism.

In its most basic sense, Eve’s work is about putting things together in ways that begin to reveal abstract or formal narratives. There is a creeping slightness and lightness of touch to her interventions in the ordering of people, objects, and materials. Elements always retain given conventional purpose and character, yet Eve’s increasingly intuitive arrangements extend and adapt these into functional sculptural properties.

Armstrong’s practice tends to fall uneasily between the formal, the relational, and the environmental. Her work is of the unwanted surpluses of urban environments, but it seems to have no position on that, nor does it appear to offer any solutions. Instead, Armstrong’s focus is on taking an otherwise unwanted object or resource and adapting it – extending or adding to its physical as well as formal functionality. What have become her signature materials to date - flattened cardboard, packing tape, and disowned property - recur not only for their physical and aesthetic functions, but for their ready availability and subsequent ability to sink back into the world. The work in her new show at Michael Lett draws upon similarly ordinary second-hand and found objects of mostly domestic or office origin.

Eve was born in Upper Hutt, New Zealand, in 1978, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2003. Recent projects have included a solo show at Artspace, Auckland, 2005- 2006; Artist residency at Enjoy, Wellington, 2006; and solo projects within Biennials in 2006 at SCAPE, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Busan, Korea. Eve Armstrong was the recipient of the inaugural Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award for visual art in 2006.

Eve has made projects with Michael Lett both in Wellington (2006), and at the Auckland Art Fair (2007). This will be her first solo presentation at the gallery.

ENDS

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