A number of Billy Apple satellite shows are being presented in Auckland, timed to coincide with the survey exhibition Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.
First up was SUCK, the first section of a two-part exhibition, Poetry in Motion, curated by Artspace director Misal Adnan Yildiz. Featuring a Suck sculpture and four small off-set lithographs on canvas of men with erections, perfectly centered on each wall, the exhibition transitioned into Poetry in Motion, a group show with with a lineup of artists including Billy Apple®, Art & Language, Bruce Barber, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler and Laurence Weiner. This link takes you to a review of SUCK.
The Artspace show was followed by BILLY APPLE SOUND WORKS at Te Uru which gathers together, for the first time, sound works produced by Apple in collaboration with composers such as Jonathan Besser, Annea Lockwood, John Osborne and Nam June Paik.
Around the same time, Starkwhite launched its contribution to the city-wide satellite shows. Curated by Mary Morrison, TOTEM presents Billy Apple alongside Arnold Manaaki Wilson. Using the golden ratio the artist has divided the two columns in Starkwhite into artist's cut and dealers's cut. Starkwhite's share is white and remains part of the gallery architecture, and Apple demonstrates his share by painting it yellow, like a 3-D bar graph. Arnold Wilson is represented with three pou whenua of maori ancestral figures - Haumia, the god of wild, uncultivated things and her children Rangitiina and Tiniia. Grouped together they signify regeneration, emphasising the need to take care of nature's ecosystems.
You can read the curators rationale for the juxtaposition of the two artists here.
Image: Billy Apple SUCK, installation view, Artspace (top); artwork for SOUND WORKS at Te Uru (middle); TOTEM, installation view, Starkwhite (bottom)
