Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room
Undoing what is riveted. See river.
Fiona Jack and Dee Williams
23 August – 16 September 2006
Opening preview: Tuesday 22 August 2006, 5.30pm
Artist talk: Wednesday 23 August 2006, 6pm
Fiona Jack and Dee Williams’ project in The Physics Room records and interprets the shifting representations and
boundaries of the Christchurch area. For the exhibition Williams’ has undertaken research about the area remotely,
sourcing images from archives, and Jack has travelled to New Zealand to map the area through a Situationist-inspired
pyschogeographic process that comes together in the exhibition as an abstract layering of paintings, drawings and maps
on all surfaces.
Fiona Jack’s recent practice is predominantly related to the community/city surrounding the gallery but she also
references, and appropriates, the methodologies of early French Situationism and the history of abstraction.
Dee Williams’ investigative practice involves extensive research that results in projects that draw attention to subtle
details around us. For The Physics Room, Williams uses photography to examine the representation of three dimensional
space in Christchurch and surrounding areas.
Jack and Williams are both graduates of the MFA programme at CalArts and currently live and work in Los Angeles, USA.
Jack has exhibited widely, as well as working as a private art teacher, and is currently on the staff of Afterall - A
Journal of Art Context and Enquiry, London. Williams completed her MFA at CalArts in 2002 and is currently teaching at
the University of Southern California.
Image credits:
Fiona Jack
I can cross these lines
I can walk these roads
I can change these colours
2005
Gallery A402, CalArts, Los Angeles
Photographer unidentified
New Zealand Free Lance Collection
Benmore hydro-electric station
PAColl-5936-55
Permission of the Alexander Turnball Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.
For further information on this exhibition please contact The Physics Room Director, Danae Mossman, on 03 379 5583 or
email danae@physicsroom.org.nz
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Showing in the okokok series:
Landscape Portrait Clare Noonan
23 August – 16 September 2006
Opening preview: Tuesday 22 August 2006, 5.30pm
Clare Noonan's Landscape Portrait is a series of photographs set in front of the geographically and politically charged
backdrop of Greenwich: zero degrees: prime meridian. Noonan plays on the imposed and moderated western conventions of
time. The photographs explore ways in which we understand, divide, and claim space, and the cognitive devices we use to
frame these.
Noonan taps into the territory of the artist as explorer, but instead of creating a new journey, the project retraces an
old journey with new eyes - from (colonial) New Zealand back to 'the mother land'. Through this process of retracing,
the documentary appearance plays with the spectre of space and time, subtly challenging the very conventions that led it
there.
Clare Noonan is a Christchurch-based artist who completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of
Canterbury in 2003. Her first solo show, Beacon, was at High Street Project, Christchurch, in 2003, and she has also
exhibited in a number of group shows at artist-run spaces in Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch.
ENDS