New Works (2021)

Kereama Taepa, in his first showing at Milford Galleries, takes us back and forward at the same time. In sculptural relief wall-mounted 3D printed works, he visits the traditions of the tiki form, tattooing and carving with a remarkable visual sensibility and dexterity that utilizes and references pop culture and the motifs of video games.

Peter Trevelyan’s vitrine-presented 3D sculptures are visual paradoxes with holographic qualities. Comprised of entirely recycled materials – he manipulates and repurposes waste materials into thread-like linear patterns. Using the outlining skeletal conventions of sculpture, Trevelyan develops considerable conversations about presence and absence, balance and tension and ways of seeing.

Russell Moses visited Milford Sound for the first time recently. Struck by its verdant immensity, the ubiquitous presence of water, its modulating and fracturing light, Moses in response delivers poetic sensations of place. In his characteristically restrained and rhythmic manner, he references the forest of Piopiotahi clinging precariously to rock faces in that hydroponic, Jurassic world while harnessing the chromatic effects and spectacle changes of light.

Chris Heaphy’s silhouetted heads stare out of the frame, as if looking to the past. Imbued with pride of place honour and the ambiguous plurality of Heaphy’s well-known plants and visual devices, titled Sunset and Daybreak, we witness the introduction and innervating role of an abstracted background, noticeably fluid and atmospheric where space moves back and forth, up and down.

Never before shown, and the important precursors to Andy Leleisi’uao’s acclaimed Pa’ceania Series, the Cryptid Abanimals Parts I-VI (2010) read like a visual game whilst being a parable of human endeavours: narratives of work, shapes which morph, an endless cycle of up and down, delivered in his signature three-colour palette.