Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time

Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time

13 September – 23 November 2008

Artist Peter Robinson will present his most recent and expansive project, commissioned by and presented only at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Opening in September, Snow Ball Blind Time will snake through the converted cinema, devouring the internal spaces of the building with formal wit and critical bite.

Curated by Gallery Director Rhana Devenport, Snow Ball Blind Time will occupy the entire 574 square metres of the Gallery. The installation will respond to and engage with the Gallery internal spaces to form a vast spatial drawing.

For more than a decade, Robinson has slipped the rug from under Aotearoa New Zealand’s identity politics and critical fetishes.

Working with the definitive material of disposable culture, polystyrene, the artist has recently turned his aggressive humour on transformations of internal architectural space and distortions of scale.

For only the second time since the opening exhibition by Leon Narbey in 1970, the entire Govett-Brewster Art Gallery will be given over to a single commissioned art work.

The use of polystyrene as a material is something that Robinson has become familiar with in recent years, however his work has taken a significant shift in direction over the past 12 months and he will explore this new approach to materiality and its complexities on a massive scale with Snow Ball Blind Time.

Govett-Brewster Director Rhana Devenport says the Gallery is honoured to be working with an artist of such capacious insight, agility and creative acumen.

Peter Robinson Soft Rock Baroque 2008 (detail) Photo: Justine Lord

“Robinson is well known in Aotearoa New Zealand for dealing with issues, notably the complexities of interracial politics within consumerist landscapes in a provocative and controversial manner. His current work engages with issues and concepts related to democracy, freedom and post-industrial production in relation to social responsibility and the environment within a language of dangerous and romantic beauty.”

Robinson is currently Associate Professor at the Elam School of Fine Arts, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries. He has held artist residencies in Germany, Australia and guest lectureships in the US, Sweden and Denmark and has recently been nominated a finalist for the 2008 Walters Prize (opening on 12 September), New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art award for outstanding contribution to contemporary art in New Zealand.

Snow Ball Blind Time will be complemented by a significant publication that includes new texts by Allan Smith (contemporary curator, critic and Senior Lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts), curator Rhana Devenport and others.

ENDS

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