Red Planet -Opens Tonight 16/5/11!

Thistle Hall is a vibrant community centre in the heart of New Zealand's cultural capital. We provide a community hall, meeting room and Wellington's only community gallery showcasing a range of artists and crafts people, from the established to the emerging. Thistle Hall is located on the corner of Cuba and Arthur streets. The shows on at Thistle Hall Community Gallery are run by the artists who hire it.

On Now
17 - 21 MAY 2011
RED PLANET: HELEN REYNOLDS.

OPENING: 5.30 - 7.30pm Monday 16 May.
OPEN: 10.00am - 6.00pm Tuesday - Sunday.

Wellington artist Helen Reynolds has an intense interest in the processes by which landscapes emerge. In this exhibition she extends this "off-world" and creates a vision of a 'Red Planet'. Helen's canvasses and complex topographical drawings reveal stripped back landscape systems that are like, yet unlike, the landscape systems of Mars. The work follows the processes that have created the incredibly deep chasms, the craters shaped meteorite impacted permafrost and the dunes created by the ferocious, nearly eternal wind storms on Mars.

Helen is a former Teaching Fellow in Landscape Architecture at Victoria University. Her background includes a diverse range of influences; years spent in Asia and degrees in mathematics and Chinese as well as Landscape Architecture and a Master of Design. This diversity combines with a sharp artistic sensibility to create her fresh take on ‘landscape art’. Helen's academic research has focused on the application of complexity theory to landscape design, and she characterises her art as being "interested in looking at the landscape as the physical evidence of nature’s complex processes, rather than as a romantic view".

www.helenreynolds.co.nz
http://helenreynolds-imageaday.blogspot.com/
http://cyborglandscapes.blogspot.com/

Up Next
23 - 29 MAY 2011
CROUCHING KIWI, HIDDEN TANIWHA: SAM RAWLINGS.

OPENING: 5.30 - 7.30pm Monday 23 May.
OPEN: 10.00am - 6.00pm Monday - Sunday.

"With a Chinese mother and a Pakeha father, I had quite a multicultural upbringing... well, sort of. I always identified with being "white", but the Chinese part of me always seemed to be tacked on, like an afterthought. Being Chinese was just a costume that I sometimes wore, a cuisine I sometimes ate, or a special occasion to attend. I viewed my culture as an outsider looking in."

With heavy influences from the pop art movement, and a dash of surrealism, 'Crouching Kiwi, Hidden Taniwha' is light-hearted critique of culture from an outsider's perspective. From this view, people and objects find their trans-cultural counterparts, peculiarities become similarities, and everyone is invited to broaden their circle and find common ground in the human condition.

This will be the first solo exhibition by Sam Rawlings, a recent medical graduate who has boldly taken a year out to satisfy a creative calling. Over the years his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and designs have been seen scattered through group exhibitions and a handful of galleries, but this is his first cohesive body of work, culminating in a solo show.

Come and see an exhibition that aims to impress with intricate realism, refresh with its diversity, and relate to you whatever your race, culture, or background.

www.facebook.com/sam.rawlings.artist

Please see http://www.thistlehall.org.nz for more information

ENDS

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