Adam Art Gallery to showcase nine dynamic New Zealand artists and their thoughts on the future

The Adam Art Gallery has invited nine New Zealand artists, designers and writers to produce new works that respond to our uncertain times – and speculate on the future.

Using the unique architectural structures of the Adam Art Gallery – situated at Victoria University’s Kelburn campus – and the online space of the gallery’s website, the artists have been asked to produce works that speculated imagine the future – in the context of the political realities of our contemporary world.

Exhibition curator Laura Preston says the exhibition will showcase fresh and innovative ideas from nine young artists, each responding in their own way to the current socio-political climate.

“The artists’ projects will act as a series of propositions for embracing this time of uncertainty, where structures and systems that we have come to know are being brought into focus and re-defined—from the mechanisms of the capitalist system and the imminent risks to the environment, to the modernist idea of progress,” she says.

She says the exhibition will consider the potential of both the gallery and the web to act as sites that reflect on the shape of power, and to consider alternatives to present institutions.

“The exhibition will also respond to the university as a site for research and critical thinking, and as a forum for the re-visioning of art histories,” says Preston.

One of the more spectacular of the works on display will be a pyramid structure created by Wellington artist Peter Trevelyan. When completed the work will be made entirely out of approximately 20,000 0.5 millimetre mechanical pencil leads.

Trevelyan says the work draws on utopian visions of the future – but a future that is still fragile and uncertain.

“Public sculptures are usually solid and iron cast – but this is more fragile, tentative and drawn, rather than real – it’s so fragile – like a utopian ideal.”

He says bringing together nine of New Zealand’s most dynamic artists is bound to produce exciting ideas.

Accompanied by a public programme of night talks, a workshop and sound event, the Adam Art Gallery will become an active site of discussion and a resource for the future.

The Future is Unwritten
11 July – 30 August 2009
In the building: Fiona Connor, William Hsu, Daniel Malone, Kate Newby, Martyn Reynolds, Peter TrevelyanOnline: Amit Charan, Narrow Gauge, Kelvin SohCurated by Laura PrestonOpening and website launch: Friday 10 July, 6pm

For a full programme please check the gallery’s website: www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgallery