SOLO 2018

SOLO is a biennial exhibition that showcases new work by Wellington artists. Each artist is commissioned and supported by The Dowse to create a project especially for this exhibition.

Featuring contemporary art across a range of media, the SOLO exhibition series provides a snapshot of art being made in Wellington and provides opportunities for artists to display new work.

SOLO 2018 will include local artists Andrew Beck, Deanna Dowling, Sonya Lacey, Dave Marshall, Matthew McIntyre Wilson and Annie Mackenzie, with projects that span photography, film, ceramics, weaving and sculpture.

Andrew Beck
Andrew Beck makes sculptures that show or challenge the photographic process. Though his work can be called photography, it does not capture reality; instead the work plays with light, space, composition and architecture. Beck’s new installation created for SOLO 2018 deconstructs the photographic surface, exploring the line between reality and representation, self and collective.

Deanna Dowling
Deanna Dowling’s newest work is about impermanence and the cyclical building practices that are common in Japanese construction. Alongside video footage recorded in Japan of sites significant to the history of construction, this installation includes a section of wooden joinery salvaged from a house under demolition in Tokyo, a remnant that is characteristic of the short life span buildings have in Japanese cities.

Sonya Lacey
Sonya Lacey’s new video installation Weekend imagines the St Bride Foundation swimming pool as a place for workers in the London newspaper printing industry to relax and socialise. To create this work Lacey has washed sheets of newspaper until the content becomes abstract, floating forms, that are then reconfigured into film. This process of translation and mediation follows her ongoing interest in the fluidity of language and information systems.

Dave Marshall
Dave Marshall will consider the utopian ideals and strange realities of people coming together as a community. Reflecting on memories of his own religious upbringing, Marshall has made a series of paintings using a pre-industrial paint recipe that consists of milk, ground seashells, clay, copper and charcoal. He continues an enquiry into traditional methods to ask, what might we still learn about ourselves from the past?

Matthew McIntyre Wilson
Matthew McIntyre Wilson (Taranaki, Ngā Māhanga and Titahi) is interested in the cultural heritage of harakeke and has been learning the craft of net making. In the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa documented the knots, construction methods and application for different nets, offering important insights to historical Māori fishing practices. McIntyre Wilson’s installation for SOLO 2018 includes fishing nets made from techniques described by Hiroa that would traditionally have been used for particular types of fish, seasons and situations.

Annie Mackenzie
Weaving, tradition and community are central to the work of Annie Mackenzie. Featuring hand-woven works that nod to domestic and utilitarian textiles, Mackenzie draws on the history and culture of some of the established weaving groups she has worked with.

Many of these organisations have been running since the 1970s, and are examples of an environment and resource developed to sustain the production of weaving throughout Aotearoa.