Gallery of Modern Art and The National Gallery of Victoria,Australia, Unnerved the NZ Project

Unnerved the New Zealand Project

Traveled to...

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

and...

National Gallery of Victoria, Australia

 

Installation view of ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’ featuring Michael Parekowhai’s work   Kapa Haka (Whero) 2003, Cosmo McMurtry 2006 and Jim McMurtry 2007

Gallery of Modern Art http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/

Anne Noble | New Zealand b.1954 | Ruby's room no.10 (detail) 2000 | Digital colour print on Hahnemuhle rag paper, ed. 6/10 | 66.5 x 100cm | Purchased 2006 | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

catalogue

    

   Lorene Taurerewa: suite of 20 drawings exhibited in cabinets under glass

    Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia,

Lorene Taurerewa | New Zealand | Psychopompe (detail) (from 'Psychopompe' series) 2008 | Pen and ink on mylar | 20 sheets: 30.5 x 23cm (each) | Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government's Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund | Collection: Queensland Art Galleryaption

Lorene Taurerewa’s works evoke feelings of uncanniness or strangeness in relatively familiar settings. Taurerewa uses an emotive visual language to draw on her ancestral inheritance, Aesop’s fables, Grimm’s fairytales and Jungian tropes, culminating in a visual code that both fascinates and repels.

Psychopompos (from Greek) means a ‘guide of souls’, and refers to a spiritual being, often animal in form, who shepherds the recently departed from this life to the next. In the psychoanalytic terminology of Carl Jung, the ‘psychopomp’ mediates our conscious and unconscious realms. In Aesop’s allegories, animal characters reflected human traits in order to illustrate moral lessons. Taurerewa’s cast of animals likewise appear to escort human protagonists to unknown places.

Taurerewa’s drawings are delicate and intuitive, and their ephemeral nature is heightened by their translucent plastic background. Here, Taurerewa draws on her study of traditional Chinese brush-and-ink painting, and its key concept of the void or emptiness. Dark and otherworldly, Psychopompe appears to exist outside time, emerging instead as the not-quite-controllable creations of psychological realms.

    Website: http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/
   http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/unnerved/artists/lorene_taurerewa

 

 Unnerved the New Zealand Project,

Lorene Taurerewa: suite of 20 drawings exhibited in cabinets under glass

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

National Gallery:of Victoria http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au