TEGAN BURT
A solo exhibition of six large scale paintings composed of private messages received by the artist. These ‘Text Message Paintings’ are an explication of personal dialogues and a dynamic play to the painted plane: individually each ‘message feed’ announces sentiment and trust (or breaking of); in relation - as each canvas is composed of several messages - localised conversations are combined with one another into false scripts that switch reader’s interpretational skills; and as a painted culmination these ‘feeds’ create a playful sphere torn between visual means of representation and abstraction.
The ‘Text Message Paintings’ are a presentation and solution that is apt to the contemporary tasks of art and artists. These paintings are not falsely indebted to the past nor are they simply preoccupied with the present. The work’s unapologetically youthful honesty is not at odds with art’s specific histories of conceptualism and aesthetics, there is a knowing relay and a taunting gesture. It is thus that these paintings hold an excitement and pertinence so foreign from the recent histories of New Zealand painting and the associated artists (#callyourselfout).
-JNK
SOLO EXHIBITION @ MERCY PICTURES, AUCKLAND
Teghan Burt
Touching Each Other
21.06 - 20.07
Mercy Pictures, Auckland