‘Communism was our utopia’: Traces of the past in utopian futures.
Public Lecture at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, May 16th 2010.

This talk will contextualise the exhibition ‘Cao Fei: Utopia’ in the ongoing tradition of art’s engagements with utopia. Departing from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” the talk examines the ecological, economic, political, and technological history of utopian dreams. This is the last day of the exhibition. Cao Fei: Utopia is a joint project by ARTSPACE Auckland and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

PSN Electronic play “10 years of bad sleep” at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in support of Chris Watson. 8 October 2009.

Catalogue Essay: “Dirty Princesses” in Michele Beevors: Debbie Does Disney, Dunedin Public Art Gallery: Dunedin, November 2008.

None of this makes for pleasant viewing. Beevors makes us complicit in these acts of violence and self-harm, and these princesses reflect the disturbing private lives of contemporary society as they harm not only themselves but by implication us. Still, I prefer the sordid reality of these princesses to the mindless aggression of the gross merchandising machine that accompanies the new release of a Disney princess story, and reflects a contemporary social morality built on fear and complacency.

download pdf: DebbieDoesDisney Catalogue

Beyond the Surface: Susan Ballard, Kim Pieters, Séraphine Pick and Maryrose Crook, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 22 April – 18 June; Hawkes Bay Cultural Trust 2 Sept – 28 Oct 2001.

Extracts from Catalogue essay:
Pages and paintings generate spaces of activity, where basic white is always stung by experience. In Beyond the Surface, three painters and one writer present these visual spaces as fragments that unfold before the viewer. Travelling between the paintings and words in this exhibition, we find ourselves in seemingly exotic places and other worlds, watching fleeting half-lives which are often pervaded by the perfume of earlier thoughts or memories.

Pick’s shelf of Earthly Possessions offers an archive of yet another kind. These Possessions may be disguised in white paint, but unlike most found objects they do not await some new use. Cameras, tape-decks, cell-phones—all of these are devices for storing information and recording the past. Pick has cancelled the objects’ functions and embellished them with traces of the lives they once led. Grandmother’s knitting hands can be found on the radio beside which she sat for years.