Three Artists Picked For Govett-Brewster Art Gallery ‘In Residence’ Programme

Three artists have been picked from more than 160 applicants to be the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre’s 2020 Artists In Residence – and will work from their own residences!

Sorawit Songsataya, Meg Porteous and Yona Lee will take up four-week residencies from their own studios or homes for the ‘In Residence’ project, which is supported by Creative New Zealand.

The call went out for artists to apply for the programme during the Covid-19 lockdown in May when the NPDC-run gallery decided to allow applicants to undertake the residencies in their own homes.

The artist residencies will be followed by the presentation of their work across a range of platforms later in the year.

Follow the Govett-Brewster on Instagram, look out on our website, or sign up to email updates to keep up-to-date as we present the ‘In Residence’ artworks. For more details about our chosen artists and the Residency Programmes we run, visit govettbrewster.com/inresidence

Resident Artists:

Sorawit Songsataya

Sorawit Songsataya’s video-installation practice explores the many tangents that connect and redefine our understandings of subjectivity and ecology. Critical reviews and essays on the artist’s work have been published in Matter Journal, Art News New Zealand, Art and Australia, Art New Zealand and Artnews America.

Winner of the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award 3D (2020) and National Contemporary Art Award (2016), Songsataya has held artist residencies with Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Wellington; McCahon House, Auckland; and the International Artists Studio Program, Stockholm.

Recent exhibitions include The Interior, Auckland Art Gallery (2019); Offspring of Rain, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space (2019); Jupiter, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (2019); Soon Enough: Art in Action, Tensta Konsthall (2018).

Songsataya is based in Pōneke, Wellington.

Meg Porteous
Meg Porteous is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist working primarily in photography and film, employing a mix of analogue and digital processes. Her practice considers common tropes in photography’s history - in particular documentary, surveillance and self-portraiture - focusing on the tension between truth and fiction that exists in the medium.

Porteous holds a BFA (Photography) from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury and a MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. Her recent exhibitions include Uncomfortable Silence, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2020); Tears in rain, Hopkinson Mossman (2019); ǝıos, Mercy Pictures (2019); Tilt, Hopkinson Mossman (2018).

Yona Lee

Yona Lee’s practice includes sculptural objects and installations that combine elaborate linear structures of stainless steel tubing with everyday objects of urban and domestic spaces. The work leaves itself open to various interpretations: structure or system, authoritarian or utopian, utilitarian or pointless.

Currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Lee has also held solo exhibitions at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and City Gallery Wellington. Her work has been included in large-scale thematic exhibitions like the 15th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale, France; and Changwon Sculpture Biennale, South Korea.

Lee lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

© Scoop Media