Satellite Gallery News

Marie E. Potter in Wellington

While Potter is recognised for her achievements and contribution to the arts at all levels in New Zealand, it is as an award winning, innovative, multi-discipline visual artist, that her potential to contribute to broader contemporary art cultural discourse is most valued. Potter has work held in many public and private collections including the Auckland War Memorial Museum, Voyager Maritime Museum, Victoria University of Wellington and the Wallace Arts Trust. She gained a Diploma of Textile art (with distinction) from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design in 1985, becoming a part time faculty member 1987-2001. Potter then returned to WCAD in 2010, to gain a Master of Fine Arts degree. She now relaunches her already established art career by holding Contemplation#2, a travelling exhibition which originally opened at Satellite Gallery Auckland in September 2012. It now travels to LightSpace New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts Wellington, to be viewed from 9^th March to 6th April 2013.

Contemplation#2 is a significant multi-facetted exhibition that demonstrates Potter’s ability to contribute to issues which re-evaluate N.Z. cultural and social traditions. She not only interrogates cultural significance and experience broadly associated with our European early settlers, but also the status of their everyday objects, and the presence and physical materiel qualities of these artefacts which are loaded with history.

Theorist Paul Grainge believes [we have the power] to revisit our past as well as history and re-invent it in the form of visual culture where the past becomes real in a creative and innovative manner (Grainge, as cited in Hines, 2007, p.5).

Further comparisons could well be related to post-postmodernism which supported everything postmodernism did not, namely, innovation, inventiveness and re-contextualisation, as seen in the Fountain by Duchamp, who re-contextualised an ordinary object, a urinal, and through relocation and giving it a new title, changed its identity (Duchamp, as cited in Darwent,2008,p.3)

These same elements underpin Potter’s work and as a result we (the viewer) are relocated to a place where we can form our own narratives, observations and experiences.

(Contemplation#2 is to be held at Lightspace Gallery, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts March/April 2013, concurrent with the NZAFA exhibition titled UsNow 2013)

For further information about the artist visit: www.marieepotter.co.nz

And 1st Prize Goes To.....

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris!

Winning first pize in The Trusts 2012 Art Sculpture Awards

Downwind: Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris

Ideas around the body, science and art are at play here, the visible and invisible. The viewer brings this work to life through smell, breath and movement - our senses activate the mechanical sensors, and we become part of the work.

Congratulations Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris on your success.