Featured work: Stella Brennan's Cities series

These video stills are from Stella Brennan's Cities series where the artist examines the language of manifestos and grand concepts of the urban. Theme for Great Cities uses text by Situationist Raoul Vaniegem and Citizen Band incorporates extracts from Friedensreich Hundertwasser's Mould Manifesto. The final work in the series, Envoy From Mirror City, reworks an extract from that posterboy of architectural post-modernism, Rem Koolhaas. His text Whatever Happened to Urbanism? laments Modernism's command and control approach to the city, while pointing to subsequent failures of imagination.

If you would like more information on these works, or others by the artist, please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Images: the video stills (from the top) are from Stella Brennan's Theme for Great Cities (2003), Citizen Band (2004) and Envoy from Mirror City (2007)

Featured work

For the past few years Grant Stevens has explored the languages of popular culture through his text, images and sound videos. His works appropriate and de-contextualise a range of cultural cliches and conventions that seem to surround us every day. Whether it's through the over abundance of mixed metaphors or the incessant onslaught of predictable plotlines, his works seem to disrupt and challenge the way we read mainstream culture.

Stevens' video In the Beyond is a mandala-like circular display of people's self-descriptive words from internet MySpace pages - a work exploring notions of spirituality and self-reflection. For further information on this work or others by the artist please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Image: Grant Stevens, In the Beyond (video still), 2008, digital video, edition of 9

Featured work

In her work Alicia Frankovich deals with the idea of the performing body that activates sculpture with physical and spatial transfer. She also addresses the question of materiality, which is produced and deferred, forming a by-product/and or a document of performance, often in the form of photographs such as Pugliese Suspension / Post-performance Object. If you would like to know more about Alcia Frankovich's work, or the work illustrated above, please email us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Image: Alicia Frankovich, Pugliese Suspension / Post-performance Object, Diptych, 2007, edition of 8.

Featured Work

As a masters student at Auckland University Lee began using a flatbed scanner to record changes in his skin. He documented sore, pores, freckles and hairs in gross detail, pressed up against the glass, then collaged the scans to create sheets of skin, deranged diaristic bodyscapes, which he presented as photographs and videos. The work combined the organic and the technological in a way that was surprising at the time. Simultaneously beautiful and repulsive, intimate and abject, it unsettled one's familiar sense of the body. Over the next few years Lee made numerous works expanding on his idea of the skin portrait, increasingly using scans of other people's bodies. By fusing different people's skin he played off the assumption that our skin defines us as individuals, separating us from others.

From this base of concerns and strategies, Lee's work has expanded in the last few years, into a range of video and photographic works, including lightboxes, that embrace pornography and religion, the abject and the spectacular; that engage the natural sublime and the technolgical sublime; that conflate high-tech artifice and monstrous bodily organicism; and that fuse vernacular experience with a sense of the religious or spiritual. The work continues to hint at new forms of visual experience as he combines a photographic logic with the isometric perspective-free gaze of the scanner and the 'planiverse' collaging tools of the computer.

If you want to know more about these works, including price, or others by the artist you can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Images by Jae Hoon Lee (from the top): Becoming (2003), Salvation #2 (2006), Two Holes (2008), all digital prints, editions of 8

Featured work

This artwork is from Gavin Hipkins' Empire series, started in 2007. This body of work takes as its starting point the appropriation of line illustrations from children's Empire and Commonwealth annuals dating from the 1950s. The original images were used to illustrate stories of adventure and historical drama in accord with the formation and ideological sustainability of the British Empire and Commonwealth including New Zealand. The illustrations also record a post-war nostalgia for colonial discovery and adventure, as well as a sense of the unifying spirit forged by the war effort, coupled with the optimisms for the shared rebuilding of Commonwealth nations in the wake of World War Two. The backdrops have been overlaid with scanned patches purchased in music store and markets creating photographs that sit somewhere between history painting and t-shirt art. If you would like more information on this work, or others by the artist, please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Image: Gavin Hipkins, Empire (Track) 2009, C-type print, 1200 x 1650mm, edition of 3