Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga announces the opening of Work Out: 5 artist projects – Dream Girls Art Collective, Simon Ward, Turumeke Harrington, Paul Darragh, Yvonne Todd
Work Out is a suite of five exhibitions by a range of practitioners, each with different strings to their bow. Navigating the fringes of the art world, the exhibition brings together street artists, industrial designers, fashion stylists and video directors, resulting in a riot of colour and energy throughout the Gallery.
Tauranga Art Gallery Senior Curator Serena Bentley says: “Work Out celebrates the breadth of creative practice across multiple forms and outcomes. Each Work Out project is aspirational; revealing the different ways in which artists negotiate the art world and wider creative contexts while also acknowledging the labour involved in being an artist. Assembled with younger audiences in mind, it’s an invitation to be bold, think big and forge your own path.”
Dream Girls Art Collective: POP-POCALYPSE! (Main Image)
Tauranga Art Gallery’s atrium space will be completely transformed into a psychedelic world dominated by mana wahine and epic taniwha created by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara based art collective. Miriama Grace-Smith, Xoë Hall and Gina Kiel are all street artists in their own right, this recently-founded collective base their projects around the concept of the ‘exquisite kaitiaki’ which recalls the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse, in which words or images are collectively assembled and transformed.
Open: 4 March – 7 May 2023
Paul Darragh: Shape Up Or Ship Out
Local artist Paul Darragh left his career as a high-profile advertising campaign manager in New York to pursue a full-time career as an artist. Darragh’s practice lies at the intersection of mural-based street art and canvas painting and his newly commissioned project exploits the intersection of these two media and the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.
Shape Up or Ship Out takes the iconic shipping containers that dominate Tauranga’s local port as a point of departure. Visual symbols of bar codes, logos and QR Codes are combined and remixed with national and maritime flags to encompass the wider language of the global shipping network.
Open: 25 Feb – 14 May 2023
Simon Ward: Music Television
Simon Ward is a self-taught animator and video director from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, with over sixty music videos under his belt. Music Television, his showreel for Tauranga Art Gallery celebrates the best of his practice from 2007 until today and features collaborations with musicians including Princess Chelsey, Disasteradio and Kalifa a.k.a Le1f.
Ward’s nostalgia-driven sensibility is fuelled by his upbringing in small town Aotearoa where boredom was alleviated through the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy.
Open: 11 Feb – 23 April 2023
Yvonne Todd: Personal Mythology
Yvonne Todd is renowned for adopting commercial photography techniques to create images of predominantly female models that fuse glamour and the mundane to intense psychological effect. Her starting point is often a garment or object around which an ambiguous narrative can be built.
Personal Mythology reveals a different working process and outcome – originally commissioned as a fashion editorial for Viva magazine. Taking the sugary pastels of Personal Mythology as a departure point, Todd has also created a new companion photograph for the Gallery’s stairwell.
Open: 25 Feb – 14 May 2023
Turumeke Harrington: Massive Props
With a background in industrial design, Turumeke Harrington’s (Ngai Tahu) interests in whakapapa, space, colour and material see her creating installations at the intersection of art and design. Commissioned by Tauranga Art Gallery, the exhibition Massive Props contains two core elements; a suite of three-metre long rugs that reference Papatuˉaˉnuku, architectural columns and bones. Viewed collectively, they are described by Harrington as a ‘big, strong, mama skeleton’ and is rendered in jarring pinks and greens, exploiting distinctions between the ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’.
In Massive Props we, the audience, are also being watched. Harrington makes a distinction between the comfort and security offered by the maternal gaze versus the menace of surveillance versus the menace of surveillance – the ‘eyes on the street’ increasingly found in urban design. Paradoxically, being watched can feel inherently safe or unsafe, and likewise Massive Props traverses moments of both comfort and discomfort. Harrington invites us to relax on the rugs for a moment and consider our support structures.
Open: 11 Feb – 23 April 2023
Work Out will be complemented with a suite of public programmes including:
Work out artist talks
11am Saturday 4 March. Artist talks with all Work Out artists in attendance. Free, no booking required.
The Sunday Creative Workshop series
Sunday 26 February. Our monthly Sunday Creative Workshop series picks up for another year with inspiration coming from the street style of Dream Girls Art Collective. In this workshop you will create your own artwork using the Dream Girls’ concept of ‘exquisite kaitiaki’ – an evolution of exquisite corpse, the Surrealist parlour game where a drawing or story is worked on and passed between multiple participants.
Sunday 26 March. This session will be led by local artist Paul Darragh.
Beer, Paint, Skate
Friday 28 April. Artist Paul Darragh hosts a workshop where painting and skating collide. Participants will learn design and painting techniques on a fresh skate deck. Further details about these and new events can be found here.