Enter the surreal, magical world of Twilight Falls

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Image: Joanna Langford Twilight Falls 2008

Media Release

August 7 2008

Enter the surreal and magical world of Joanna Langford’s Twilight Falls

Currently transforming the Open window space at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth is Joanna Langford’s surreal and enchanting world Twilight Falls.

Open Window curator Melanie Oliver says Twilight Falls encourages us to delight in the unlikely.

“During the day the ad hoc construction process is exposed, the recycled materials and spontaneous architecture grounding the work in texture, time and reality. However as twilight falls, sinister shadows lengthen and the ebbing light that throbs from below provides glamorous drama in the oncoming wintry night,” says Oliver.

Wellington-based Langford uses readily available materials that are often recycled or found. In Twilight Falls a flock of grimy computer keys chaotically tumble into an organic land form. “I look for materials that have properties that render them easy to work with and which I can access en mass. In Twilight falls I used computer keys which were practical ‘ready made’ building blocks,” says Langford.

Mythical and mystical places like Machu Picchu in South America have also been influential in Langford’s work, she notes.

“I am interested in landscapes that exist in the real but have that feeling of the fantastic. The expansive, ocean like surface of the desert, the geothermal landscapes of Rotorua or the volcanic landscape of Cappadoccia all have traits that make them feel otherworldly, where it is easy to feel a slipping away of reality.”

Langford graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 2004 with a Master of Fine Arts in painting, having completed her undergraduate degree at the Waikato Institute of Technology.

She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around New Zealand as well as a range of artist residencies. In 2006 Langford was the Olivia Spencer Bower fellow at The Arts Centre, Christchurch and undertook a Royal Overseas League Residency in London and Scotland. Later this year Langford will travel to Iceland to take up a residency at Samband íslenskra myndlistarmanna (SÍM), The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavík.

Open window is the site of a new series of contemporary art projects featuring a range of emerging artists offering art to the public 24/7. The works engage with the commercial nature of the shop-front window and the attributes particular to window gazing.

Langford is the fourth artist to exhibit in Open window. Her work Twilight Falls will be exhibited until 31 August.

ENDS

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