Culture

Curated by Victoria Bell and featuring works by Jenny Bain, Michele Beevers, Victoria Bell, Neil Emmerson, Tenille Lategan, Simone Montgomery & Karen Taiaroa

Suture Self is an exhibition featuring the work of staff, recent graduates and a current masters student from the Dunedin School of Art. Curated by Victoria Bell, Suture Self features works that incorporate stitch-based works and examine the relationship between art and medicine, with stitch and fabric providing the literal threads entwining the two together. 
A highlight of the exhibition was Michele Beever’s exquisite The Anatomy Lesson - Horse and Rider, after Stubbs. Beever has created two stunningly beautiful knitted sculptures of the skeletal remains of a human and an upright skeleton of a horse leaning down as though it were about to crush the remains of the human body below. The Anatomy Lesson - Horse and Rider, after Stubbs examines the relationship between death and knitting. Focusing upon the way in which knitting protects, this work is formulated around the human experience with textiles, from being wrapped in cloth as a new born baby to being encased with cloth upon death. The works contain an element of fragility, as though these dry white bones have been reassembled in a mourning ritual. 
Containing the same unnerving dynamism one would liken to a snake is Simone Montgomery’s 101 Reasons to Shop. As it silently slithers across the gallery space, Montgomery’s work captures the viewer’s gaze into a hypnotic constriction. Consisting of unremarkable materials such as recycled plastic bags and clear plastic, Montgomery has transformed the seemingly ordinary into an incredibly beautiful transparent and textural sculpture. Appearing almost like a spinal cord or perhaps a treacherous snake lulling it’s victim into a false sense of security, before crippling the compulsive purchaser in financial burden. In terms of materiality the exaggerated familiarity of 101 Reasons to Shop consolidates the divide between body and fabric and body and form. Montgomery tactfully probes a deeper consciousness, by examining both the environmental strain and ethical implications our consumerist driven society breeds.
Neil Emmerson’s Gay on Demand, from the The Glass Closet series (2009), comprises of a wardrobe filled with different ‘gender’ identities. Emmerson’s works highlight the way in which we perform our identities partially through the act of dressing. Gay on Demand consists of a range of almost apocalyptic suits arranged on makeshift metal frames. It is as though Emmerson intended the viewer to experience the act of trying on these different suits to experience a different identity and understand how each suit harbours protective qualities. Emmerson communicates both a destabilisation of a constructed ‘gender’ identity and also considers connotations associated with gay experience in the public realm. In particular he explores the way in which the protective nature of dressing has seemingly become a necessity to everyday life.