May

Danie Mellor

Pleasure and Vexation – the strata and spectacle of history
27 May – 19 August 2018

Curated by Pātaka Art + Museum, this will be the first major exhibition of works by this award-winning contemporary Australian artist to be shown in New Zealand. Over 20 outstanding works, many large in scale, including some loaned from Australian museum and gallery collections.

A monumental mixed-media work on paper from 2010 entitled Fruits of labour provides the starting point for this selection of technically-astonishing drawings, paintings and digitally-manipulated photography, through which Mellor explores indigenous and Australian histories.

Mellor, with both indigenous and non-indigenous heritage, stresses the significance of both Indigenous Australians and colonial histories, the need to talk about their interaction, and the issues that arise from those two things being parallel.