Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room

The risk of it all falling apart.
Zina Swanson
29 April–24 May 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 28 April 2009, 5.30pm

A specific and very delicate curiosity is about to stake itself out within The Physics Room thanks to the patient and persistent hand of Zina Swanson. Drawn on by the impulse to gather and collect over the days and weeks leading up to the installation of this naturalia inspired endeavour, Swanson offers us a lengthy chain of pressed and preserved daisies as a temporary reliquary trading on the histories and evocative potential of plants.

Hoisted up upon carefully wrought glass crutches, the interlinked paper-thin blooms no longer retain the animation that initially awarded them the apt moniker of “days eye” as these unwitting flowers have fallen in to service within a much larger, elegant and memorable scheme.

Tracing the perimeter of the gallery, Swanson has left only a small ambulatory passage for visitors to this contemporarily constructed natural relic around the outside of the room. Guided into an alternative pathway of navigation about the space, the quaint and charismatic fragility of such a gesture is further removed from the hope of any widely shared or collectivising nostalgia of glowing days gone by through the work’s confident exclusion of visitors to the majority of The Physics Room’s main space.

Cordoning and corralling her public with the merest suggestion of a line not to cross, Swanson’s intense and sweetly obsessional efforts channel the captivating force of these most simple things. Their fragile materiality, and the delicacy of the task that picked, pressed and linked these small wonders that remain symbols of both innocence and deceit, stands as a dual testament to transitory and transforming fascinations, and the ever present possibility of things falling apart at any moment.

Zina Swanson is a Christchurch-based artist who graduated in 2003 from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts with a BFA in Sculpture. She exhibited with The Physics Room in 2007 and has installed a number of large scale sculptural works, as well as several solo exhibitions of drawings nationally at ARTSPACE, Auckland; Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington; HSP, Christchurch; and 64zero3, Christchurch. Swanson has work in numerous private collections and in 2007 Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu purchased the mixed media sculpture Some People's Plants Never Flower... along with a suite of eight drawings by the artist.

Cool Water Woman
Anya Henis
29 April–24 May 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 28 April 2009, 5.30pm

Focusing on the use of specific painting techniques to capture something of the surface quality of flowing and falling water, Cool Water Woman by Auckland based artist Anya Henis also makes the most of the opportunity of subverting the presentation of what has become a potent associative trope as mobilised within high cultural and commercial realms alike.

Waterfalls, eddies and rippling pools all feature in this suite of works within which the artist has employed a variety of painting processes and textural effects to explore surface, and play on the way in which we view and experience two dimensional images.

Henis captures single moments of the shimmering effect and foam of waterfalls and the incredibly subtle tidal changes that create glistening alternations across any fluid surface. Yet, these static glimpses create an odd sense of disjuncture between our recognition of the subject of these painted works and fleeting nature of such moments in real life.

Also borrowing its title from a specific brand of perfume, Cool Water Woman also gestures towards the association of beauty and notions of the ‘feminine’ with the fluidity and flux of water. Playing so confidently with the associative potential of such disparate sources, Henis’ unusually process focused, meditative works might also be able to be read as a gentle satire of the legend of the birth of Venus, and all the painted reproductions that particular tale has spawned over the centuries.

Anya Henis graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland with a BFA in 2005. Recent exhibitions include: Jungle Television, Newcall, Auckland (2008); Forestaurant (group exhibition), City Art Rooms, Auckland and HSP, Christchurch (2007); The Abandonment of Splendid Speculation, Starkwhite (2006); Compelled (group exhibition), ARTSPACE, Auckland (2005). Henis lives and works in Auckland and is currently a Co-Director of the artist-run space A Centre For Art.

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