Local Knowledge

MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release: 15 November 2011

A Time and a Place for Everything

Local Knowledge opens at The Dowse, 17 December 2011

Get ready for Dowse–Time in The Hutt this summer when Whanganui artist Julian Priest creates a unique time-zone for The Dowse Art Museum. Defying the regulations of timekeeping, Priest’s installation of a clock on the front of The Dowse is just one of the works in Local Knowledge, an exhibition that deals with the specifics of location and time, the connections between them, and what it means to be at home.

Local, national and international artists feature in the show, with contributors based near (Lower Hutt’s Ans Westra and Veranoa Hetet) and far (the UK’s Simon Faithfull).

Faithfull’s intriguing film 0°00 Navigation charts an epic journey to walk the Greenwich Meantime line across the UK, with a figure literally walking through time. We watch as a man using a GPS device follows the exact line of longitude, negotiating all the obstacles along the way - windows, streams, hedges… “This is art of its time, for sure”, Martin Herbert, Time Out Veranoa Hetet is from Waiwhetu near The Dowse in Lower Hutt. Her work Te Whanau Paneke pays tribute to her family’s ability to incorporate traditional ways into contemporary life and work. Meantime, Wellington artist Mike Heynes recreates history in the Hutt with two models that represent ‘what if’ scenarios of local sites and events while Ans Westra’s classic photos of street life capture Lower Hutt residents in the everyday actions of shopping, strolling or hanging out. Another photographer, Wellington’s Andrew Ross, depicts his subjects within their own houses or workplaces against the accumulation of objects that comprise a life fully lived.

Auckland artist Dan Arps, winner of the 2010 Walters Award, has created a new installation in and around a caravan in the gallery, A Scale Model of Christchurch. The work conjures up histories eradicated from his childhood town and hints at the city’s architectural response to the disaster through temporary construction; camping and containers. Another Aucklander, Joe Sheehan, is well known for his pounamu jewellery but Songs Remain The Same II is a greenstone cassette tape that plays a soundtrack of the river from where its material was sourced.

Incorporated into the exhibition is Living Halls, a project initiated by Auckland artist Fiona Jack that brings together 50 hobbyist and professional artists from around New Zealand to commemorate their local War Memorial Hall in a unique series of paintings.

Local Knowledge
17 December 2011 – 22 April 2012
The Dowse Art Museum | FREE ENTRY
dowse.org.nz

ENDS

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