Snow Ball Blind Time – An enduring companion

Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time – An enduring companion to landmark exhibition

The Govett-Brewster is proud to announce the release of the highly anticipated publication Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time, a beautiful and enduring companion to the landmark exhibition of the same name, commissioned by and presented at the Gallery in 2008.

More than an exhibition catalogue, Snow Ball Blind Time traces Robinson’s exploration of materials and ideas through the eight major projects since his formative ACK installation at Artspace, Auckland 2006, seen as a pivotal change of direction in his artmaking practice.
Govett-Brewster Director Rhana Devenport, the book publisher and commissioner of the work says, “This new contribution to art publishing in Aotearoa registers one of the most conceptually powerful and physically arresting projects in recent times. Snow Ball Blind Time was an ephemeral art project entirely deserving of this attention.”

This elegant hard-back publication features striking photography of the exhibition by Bryan James (Govett-Brewster Exhibitions Co-ordinator and Photographer) and critical essays by Allan Smith (Senior Lecturer, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland), Rachel Kent (Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and Rhana Devenport (Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery). Also included are associated drawings by Robinson and a walkthrough DVD of the exhibition.

Occupying the entire 574 square metres of the Govett-Brewster, Snow Ball Blind Time was 18 months in gestation. The exhibition was only the second occasion that an artist has been commissioned to create a single work for the entire Gallery spaces in its 40-year history; the other being Leon Narbey’s Real Time, which opened the Govett-Brewster in 1970.

“Snow Ball Blind Time responded to and engaged with the Gallery’s seven interconnecting spaces to form a vast spatial drawing; an immersive seven-stranded line that consumed the seven levels,” says Devenport.
“The work harnesses the language of the spectacular; it inhabits the converted cinema, devouring the internal spaces of the building with formal wit, critical bite and comic gigantism.”

Peter Robinson was born in Ashburton, Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1966, and currently lives and works in Auckland where he is Associate Professor at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. He has held residencies in Germany and Australia, guest lectureships in the US, Sweden and Denmark, represented New Zealand at the 2001 Venice Biennale and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Walters Prize for outstanding contributions to contemporary art in New Zealand for his work ACK.

Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time is published by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in association with the exhibition of the same name, which was presented with the support of the University of Auckland’s National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries (NICAI) Research Development Fund and Styrobeck Plastics at the Govett-Brewster from 13 September – 23 November 2008. The book is available through bookstores nationwide. RRP NZ$55.

ENDS

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