FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Two New Exhibitions At The Physics Room
Welcome to the Jungle
Richard Orjis
2–26 April 2008
Opening preview: Tuesday 1 April 2008, 5.30pm
Seeking out what Richard Orjis refers to as The CULT of CHCH, Welcome to the Jungle isn't afraid to get amongst it and
promises to be a dark yet verdant invocation of this place, and the currents that many concede run through it. Orjis
will be documenting The CULT of CHCH in a series of portrait sessions at The Physics Room during 29 and 30 March in the
lead up to the opening of his project for the gallery.
Well known for his hot-housed floral montages in tribute to the likes of Floros the flower idol and his series of hand
painted mud portraits of 2005–07, in Christchurch Orjis is inviting locals to the gallery to cover themselves in a soft,
sooty carapace of coal dust for the shoot. The images taken of those brave initiates will then form part of Orjis'
exhibition at The Physics Room.
If you'd like to know more or take part please contact the gallery at either 03 379 5583 or
physicsroom@physicsroom.org.nz.
Appropriating the title of Guns N' Roses' hit single from their 1987 album Appetite for Destruction for this project,
it's not the first time Orjis has been attracted to what he has described as a "gothic sensibility" that seeks to
"access the sublime through dark beauty, melancholy, lust, death, fear" and the fecund collectivity of cults.
In reference to his earlier documentation and investigations into the Empire of Dirt Orjis states that "Nature can be
seen as beautiful and pure, and intrinsically good, but also as dangerous and destructive, a spectacle of the devourers
and the devoured." A rich and unnerving aesthetic shadows Orjis' more anthropological investigations of the fictive
empires and sectarian facades that provide the context for his investigations. Conceived of as a collision between "art
history and popular culture…fear and lust; past, present and future" the varied practices represented within Welcome to
the Jungle will stake out something of the territory Orjis finds himself most interested in at present.
Richard Orjis was born in 1979 and completed his MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2006 having
previously studied at Auckland University of Technology, 1999–2001. He has exhibited extensively including exhibitions
in New York, Basel, Miami, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Auckland. Recent exhibitions include My Empire of Dirt at Roger
Williams Contemporary, Auckland, 2007; Picnics and Revolutions a group show curated by Orjis, Roger Williams
Contemporary, 2007; The Orchid Show, Mount Street, Auckland, 2006 and Me, Me, Me, Room 103, Auckland, 2005. He is
currently represented by Starkwhite and McNamara Gallery in New Zealand and Galeria Luis Adelantado in Spain.
For further information on this exhibition please contact The Physics Room on +64 3 379 5583 or email
physicsroom@physicsroom.org.nz
The Physics Room receives major funding from Creative New Zealand/Toi Aotearoa.
King Tides Rising
Pauline Rhodes
2–26 April 2008
Opening preview: Tuesday 1 April 2008, 5.30pm
With patient, transient processes, over the course of the last 30 years Pauline Rhodes has been gathering, working with,
and then redistributing materials within the New Zealand landscape. Interested in the physicality and sensations that
comprise any experience of place, Rhodes’ investigations explore the hypnotic formal attributes of simple scenarios
alongside the cyclic, enduring processes that keep local environments alive and in motion.
Through a process of transference, Rhodes re-orientates our shared expectations of cultured, purposefully manufactured
materials and objects within the raw context of the natural landscape. In her own words she describes her working method
as one in which “ambiguities, disjunctures and fractures are inbuilt” and her practices can easily be read as testaments
to the mercurial nature of sites, histories and the imperfect permanence of materials.
Rhodes’ dedication to ephemeral processes and context-specific experiences both informed and affirmed the post-object
traditions and performative interventions that emerged in art during the 1970s here in New Zealand. As Christina Barton
explains in Ground/Work: The Art of Pauline Rhodes, “both indoors and in the environment her works function not as
discrete objects but as punctuation marks in a semantic field of matter, material and meaning.”
In as much, King Tides Rising, which presents the skeletal structure of a white framed vessel lying static within the
gallery while documentation of its earlier, thwarted voyage is projected within the space, also steps outside of Rhodes’
familiar way of presenting her efforts as either an ‘extensum’ that stretches materials out within the natural
environment, or an ‘intensum’ that formally congregates materials within a gallery context but doesn’t necessarily
highlight the traces of experience and process that brought them there.
For The Physics Room, Rhodes allows her longstanding operational tactics to purposefully collide and leave their
testimonial debris like a high tide mark within which others are invited to read the chaos and resilience of the
personal and elemental processes that have shaped this work.
Born in Christchurch, Pauline Rhodes lived in Wellington, Westport and also abroad in Nigeria and England before
returning to Christchurch in 1970. She obtained her Diploma of Fine Art in Sculpture at the University of Canterbury in
1974. Rhodes began her outdoor projects in the mid–1970s and was the first recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower Award
in 1987. She has exhibited her work in conjunction with a wide range of New Zealand galleries. Recent projects include:
Intensum/Extensum 1981, ARTSPACE, Auckland, 1998; Site specific installation as part of The Oblique Trust’s Otira
Project, 1999; Ziggurat 2000, Art & Industry Biennial, Christchurch, 2000; Toxic Gains, The Physics Room, Christchurch, 2000; Drink, The Physics Room’s
Kiosk, Christchurch, 2002; Groundplates, Gridlocked, Christchurch, 2004, Gathering Intensities, Blue Oyster Gallery,
Dunedin, 2006.
ends