Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

GRWM is a new group exhibition showing at RM gallery. The show brings together the practices of Aria McInnes, Keani Rewha, and Rita Takeuchi, into an exploration of the performed self. The title of the show GRWM references the viral online video genre ‘Get Ready With Me’ a trend in which the personal everyday rituals of individuals are performed and shared to a public platform/audience. Each of the artists reflects on these notions through their respective practices, analysing the contemporary online behaviour that surrounds them and its effects on everyday rituals, and the navigation of everyday life. 

Aria McInnes is a Tāmaki-based artist and retailer who examines how sincerity is staged across personal and private life within consumer culture through a practice of sculptural installation. Within GRWM, McInnes displays an installation of an at-home gym. Producing a mixture of found and fabricated campy gym equipment, that shifts the gallery space into a set-like stage of self improvement.  

Rita Takeuchi is a Tāmaki-based artist, who produces beautiful oil paintings that seek to delve into the exploration of the diaristic everyday. Reframing the typically overlooked mundane and pulling it into a place of meditative reflection to be remembered. 

Maya caught up with both Aria and Rita about the show.

Marie Shannon is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice primarily explores the quotidian and profound details of her immediate domestic surroundings. Predominantly working in photography, but also video and drawing, Shannon delicately and intimately captures her subjects on a large-format camera, representing them at their finest through these beautiful vintage silver gelatin and large digital photographs. Narratives and objects of previous homes, love notes and faxes from her late husband Julian Dashper, and sketches by her son Leo alike, her memoiristic practice embraces both the mundane and the personal, inviting the viewer intimately into her world. 

Her current solo exhibition at Trish Clark Gallery, Life Stories, presents a curated selection and mini survey of her practice – spanning works from the 80s as well as those from more recent years. Presenting photographs and a body of moving image works, the show brings together over forty years of Shannon’s work, life, and practice, many of which were included in her survey exhibition, Rooms found only in the home, developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2018, which went on to tour Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland as well.

Sof had a kōrero with Marie Shannon about Life Stories and her overall practice. 

Skye Lunson-Storey (Whakatōhea, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice explores climate change, urban infrastructure, site-responsive approaches, and Indigenous futurisms through various media – primarily working across moving image, sound, and sculpture to dissect her subject matter. 

Her current solo exhibition at Window Gallery, Te Mauri o te Wai, takes its name after Auckland Council's freshwater vision to protect and enhance the life-sustaining capacity of water – responding to the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Day floods and the ongoing failures of our urban water infrastructures through this sculptural installation. 

In Te Mauri o te Wai, concrete, steel, wool, rainwater, and harakeke act as vessels to resound the loss of wetlands in Aotearoa, holding great memory, mauri, and agency as materials. Here, the artist asks how we might shift from containing water to living with it – imagining a future where natural materials and infrastructures are treated as a healing aid and collaborator in our relationship with water.

Sof had a kōrero with Skye about Te Mauri o te Wai. 

Yvonne Todd is a Tāmaki-based multidisciplinary artist, whose practice tends to obscure the familiar through a range of media to explore her subject matter – imperfection, absurdity, and the uncanny, all guiding her material language. 

Her current solo exhibition at the Arts House Trust at Pah Homestead, Diary of a Carrot, sees Todd further explore this long-standing interest in food as a subject – using a melange of sculpture, found and personal objects, AI-generated imagery, and staged photography to make this absurdist narration on the act of eating. 

Best known for her work in staged photography, the show presents a shift in Todd’s process – using AI to produce a new series, Sullen 1880s Nibblers, which sees an assemblage of unenthusiastic Victorian women vacuously prodding at the plates of food they hold. 

Paired alongside personal archives, earlier work, and held within the historic home at Pah Homestead, here, food is not conceptually examined so much through the present, as it is through the past – allowing these notions of domesticity and nostalgia to thread and bind the works in the space, as viewers chew on the peculiar ways we engage with what, and how we consume. 

Sof caught up with Yvonne about Diary of a Carrot, and her wider practice.