New exhibitions at UC galleries
16 May 2011
The Ilam Campus Gallery and The Casting Room at the University of Canterbury will this week host exhibitions of work by Master of Fine Arts student Julie Ross and an installation by sculpture student Tim Middleton.
The Ilam Campus Gallery and The Casting Room at the University of Canterbury will this week host exhibitions of work by Master of Fine Arts student Julie Ross and an installation by sculpture student Tim Middleton.
Julie's body of work, titled alterpeace, is based on her interest in ideas about faith/science, intelligent design/chaos, creation/evolution, love/belief. She has created pictures in photoshop combining images from a variety of sources to celebrate a range of beliefs about our origins in a quirky, surreal way.
"I enjoy using Renaissance paintings to represent ideas of God, faith, love, creation. These are combined with images from science books to represent evolution, man-made, science, progress," she said.
"The technique of gesso transfer allowed me to faithfully represent Renaissance paintings. Into these I built evolutionary concepts symbolised by organs and cells etc. In some ways the oil painted parts infer today's focus on scientific proof, which some see as challenging ideas of faith and a supreme creator. My belief is that faith and science work beautifully together as visually suggested in some of the work.
"Alterpeace celebrates my love of titles and word play which is an important part of my practice. It references the altered peace we sometimes feel when confronted by surrealist art, similarly when our personal beliefs are challenged. And, of course, many of the historical images are from altarpieces with their rich narrative component."
Tim's installation, knuckle dust, takes its cue from the individuating of multiple plaster casts of a single object imbued with text. This was the result of an investigation into the behaviour of text placed in conjunction with an object. These casts sit on an individual plinth, itself cast in plaster, confronting the often fraught relationship between object and plinth.
This installation brings together the art historical and sub-cultural worlds in their complicit conflations.
- alterpeace 18-20 May Ilam Campus Gallery, Block 2, University of Canterbury, School of Fine Arts Opening hours: 11.30am-4.30pm
- knuckle dust 18-20 May The Casting Room, Block 3, University of Canterbury, School of Fine Arts Opening hours: 11.30am-4.30pm
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