Silk and Lace and After All at the Blue Oyster

Silk and Lace and After All at the Blue Oyster

The Blue Oyster turns 13 this year and to celebrate we have invited eight artists from around New Zealand to reflect on its history. As Ali Bramwell wrote in her article ‘Unstable Institutional Memory: 10 Years at the Blue Oyster,’ our recollection of events, exhibitions and people associated with the Blue Oyster is created collectively, and is therefore patchy - filled with half-truths and embellishments, most of which are unintentional.

Silk and Lace were chosen because of their significance in the lineage of anniversary presents: the thirteenth year requires a gift of silk or lace. The eight artists were chosen because their practices intersect with Silk and Lace in one way or another. These artists were asked to go through the Blue Oyster’s archives and find a work, an exhibition, or an artist that appealed to them in some way, they were then asked to re-imagine the work through the filter of their own practice. This rather loose curatorial vision allowed even more room for disruptively productive slippages to occur around the interpretation and re-presentation of historical exhibitions.

The result of this collaboration is eight works and one performance: Jill Sorensen’s Flower Performance X. In 2009 Blue Oyster Gallery presented an exhibition by Australian artist Sylvia Schwenk titled They paved paradise, put up a parking lot. This show, titled after Joni Mitchell's 1970 song 'Big Yellow Taxi' engaged with environmental issues and the human cost of unfettered capitalism. As part of this project Schwenk orchestrated the interactive performance work X Performance Dunedin in which she choreographed and directed local participants to form a giant X with their bodies across an intersection connecting the Octagon to the surrounding streets. On Tuesday 10 April 2012 this performance will be re-interpreted by Auckland artist Jill Sorensen. Sorensen’s reworking of Schwenk’s performance reflects upon the 99% occupation of the Octagon and pays tribute to civilian activism, from the Flower Power era to present day. Rather than making the cross with the bodies of the participants Sorensen is inviting participants to lay a cross of flowers as gesture of support for peaceful protest past, present and future.

Running alongside Silk and Lace in the Lower Gallery is Dunedin-based artist Desi Liversage’s exhibition of new work titled After All. Working with a collection of found textile objects including small gilt-framed silk prints that feature well-known European portraits of women and children, as well as pastoral landscapes, Liversage stitches jarring contrasts into the images. In doing this, Liversage challenges the values to which the original works refer and rely on. In addition to stitching anachronistic and provocative material into the works Liversage also uses shweshwe and wax prints, African fabrics co-opted from previous colonial masters that add their own layer of complex history. 

ENDS

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