Rethinking the stories we tell of the future

A new exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery challenges 13 artists from New Zealand and Australia to document a 21st-century in which machines, humans and nature have come together. AMONG THE MACHINES provides a setting to rethink the stories we tell of the future and the kinds of images that will help get us there. Each artist presents two works: one selected by curators Su Ballard and Aaron Kreisler, and the other a new work that creates a response to or counter to the original work. The lineup of artists includes Stella Brennan, Jae Hoon Lee and Ann Shelton. Read more...

Image: Haydon Fowler, The New World Order (12013), video still

Stella Brennan project goes online at SCREENS

Stella Brennan's first online work has been launched on SCREENS. Instant Pictures is a series of networked pages taking the viewer into their tiniest details, gateways and to the next enveloping image-scape lodged amongst the hairs, scratches and dust particles.

Founded and curated by Luke Munn and Jeff Nusz, SCREENS is series of commissioned online works by artists seeking to redefine the artgame/interactive field with pieces that create new relationships, deal with untouched themes, and utilise on and offline media.

Image; Stella Brennan, Instant Pictures (still), 2011, SCREENS

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)

FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History

Stella Brennan’s video projection South Pacific (2007) is showing in the exhibition FEEDFORWARD, The Angel of History curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul. The exhibition runs at the LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain from 22 October 2009 to 5 April 2010.  

"The projects in FEEDFORWARD create a complex picture of the global political and social forces that drive us forward. The exhibition features both problematic aspects of the present and future, and the potential for collectivity and responsible action. At the nadir of the current economic crisis FEEDFORWARD is in effect about cleaning up after the 20th century and asks the question, what is progress now." From the LABoral release which you can read here.

Image: Stella Brennan with David Perry, South Pacific, 2007, Single Channel DVD, Stereo Sound, 10 minutes

Last week

Stella Brennan's project The Middle Landscape (downstairs) and Matt Henry's Flatline exhibition (Project Space) both close Saturday 3 October.

Images from the top: Stella Brennan, The Middle Earth, installation view, Starkwhite; Matt Henry, Flatline, installation view, Starkwhite Project Space

The Middle Landscape reviewed

You can read a review of Stella Brennan's exhibition The Middle Landscape here. The show runs to 3 October 09.

Image: Stella Brennan, The Middle Landscape, installation view, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ

Stella Brennan: The Middle Landscape

Stella Brennan's exhibition The Middle Landscape runs to 3 October 09. Brennan says: "The work addresses our desire to come into contact with wild nature, but our inability to survive it without physical and cultural framing. The core ideas of the project are an investigation of our notion of the natural, of biosecurity and ecological utopianism." You can read the full exhibition release here.

Images: Stella Brennan, The Middle Landscape, installation views, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ

Coming up at Starkwhite

The aesthetic of Stella Brennan's The Middle Landscape is theatrical, incorporating both landscape gardening and the brightly coloured functionality of a sporting goods store. Entering the space, sounds and flickering light emanate from three tents pitched on the gallery floor, while drifts of pine bark heaped up around the space soften the acoustics and give off an earthy smell. Bright yellow extension cables snake across the floor and into tents, feeding electronics inside. The Middle Landscape runs from 7 September - 3 October 09 and you can read the full exhibition release here.

Image: Stella Brennan press image for The Middle Landscape

Critical-Digital-Matter

Aotearoa Digital Arts, New Zealand's only digital artists network, held its 6th annual symposium in Wellington recently with a line up of contributors that included Stella Brennan (a co-founder of ADA) and Phil Dadson. You can find updates from the symposium here. And those interested in the digital arts should check out The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader co-published with Clouds. In this comprehensive anthology editors Stella Brennan and Su Ballard present essays, artists' pageworks and personal accounts that explore the production and reception of digital art. Ranging from research into the preservation of digital artworks to the environmental impact of electronic culture, from discussions of lo-tech aesthetics to home gaming, and from sophisticated data mapping to pre-histories of new media, the book presents a screen grab of digital art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. You can purchase the book from Clouds. 

Images: Phil Dadson presenting at Critical-Digital-Matter: The 6th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium, 26-28 June 2009, Victoria University School of Design, Wellington; and the cover of The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader  

FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History

Stella Brennan’s video projection South Pacific (2007) will be included in the exhibition FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History at the LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain. Curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul, the exhibition runs from 17 July to 11 January 2010. The lineup of artists in the exhibition includes AES+F, Nancy Davenport, Cao Fei, Knowbotic Research and Rachel Rakena.

“In his essay ‘On the concept of History’ Walter Benjamin interprets Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as an ‘angel of history’ transfixed by the wreckage of the past that is piling up in front of him while being propelled backwards into the uncertain future by a storm (progress). Benjamin’s angel of history yet again seems to capture the current moment in time where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, unresolved, while globalized economic, political, technological and cultural forces inexorably feed us forward in direction that may or may not represent progress. FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History will feature artworks that reflect a horrified recognition of these forces of the present and a struggling, even optimistic desire for the future.” Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul
Image: Stella Brennan with David Perry, South Pacific, 2007, Single Channel DVD, Stereo Sound, 10 minutes