New Exhibitions: g. bridle / Aurélien Froment

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TWO NEW EXHIBITIONS AT THE PHYSICS ROOM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The New Honesty: a critique of the Retreat
g. bridle
3–28 June 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 2 June 2009, 5.30pm

The New Honesty is an exhibition that collects and incorporates a range of objects and visual cues related to the further investigation and assessment of the Retreat as orchestrated by the Wellington based artist g. bridle. Acquired and selected from a number of artists, the composite works find themselves specifically aligned in terms their conceptual strength, integrity and their pertinent relationships to an existing framework of practice.

Resting on the allusion-filled and illusory potential of the notion of the Retreat, The New Honesty is a collection itinerant in its origins and its methods of exhibition. Its composite parts have been collected over recent years and from a range of sources. All the contributors have led their own lives, and the collection therefore reflects the idiosyncrasies of their individual tastes and personal trajectories.

When the collection is exhibited, the selected space operates as a type of sanctuary where the individual components that reside under the umbrella of the Retreat merge to work in harmony. Cast in the likeness of a museological display, at The Physics Room The New Honesty seeks to present this collection in an evocative but approachable manner, a strategy that provides an essential part of its charm.

Employing the form of the exhibition itself—as both medium and conduit—The New Honesty’s various elements seek to provide a critique of specific object-relations as well as create the opportunity for gallery visitors to immerse themselves in the Retreat’s mysterious endeavour.

g. bridle graduated from Massey University, Wellington in 2004. the Retreat was last exhibited in Segregated Enlightenment: A Critique of the Retreat, City Gallery Wellington (2007).

The Physics Room receives major funding from Creative New Zealand/Toi Aotearoa.

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Théâtre de Poche
Aurélien Froment
3–28 June 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 2 June 2009, 5.30pm

Invoking the illusory potential of images and investigating the way languages, be they visual, linguistic or symbolic, articulate relations among things, Théâtre de Poche presents its audience with the increasingly enigmatic figure of a magician who proceeds to conjure a series of images into the air.

Explicating a cyclical tale, this playful meditation by the French-born, Dublin-based artist Aurélien Froment sees stills from cinema history slowly shuffled and hieroglyphs nestle alongside natural wonders, challenging notions of the arrangement and precedence of images and all that they evoke.

When considered in translation, ‘Pocket Theatre’ also prepares its audience for an act of simple but effective entertainment and ultimately references the fabled figure of Arthur Lloyd, the ‘Human Card Index’, who could produce almost any kind of printed item from one of his pockets on request.

Situating itself knowingly as a partial and subjective take on the all-pervasiveness of contemporary visual culture Théâtre de Poche investigates the production of both image- and object-relations and the discursive meanings that such relationships inevitably disclose.

Articulating the tension, and playing with the proximity, between signifier and signified within the system of signs in flux within, Théâtre de Poche confabulates cinematic fragments, relics and discursive tropes with sentience and mystique.

Aurélien Froment (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Since graduating from the fine arts academy of Nantes, France, he has been working with different media such as film, sculpture and photography on a variety of projects that have taken the shape of installations, scale models and mass produced items.

Works by Froment have been shown at, among others, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Tate Britain, London; the Nam June Paik Centre in Seoul; STUK, Leuven; and at the 8e Biennale, Panama. He is also currently preparing a series of solo presentations at Montehermoso, Vitoria; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Gasworks, London and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.

ENDS

The Physics Room receives major funding from Creative New Zealand/Toi Aotearoa.

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