Press Release – The Dowse

See you Sunday for Big Day Dowse with the Phoenix Foundation and Anika Moa. Local bands Newtown Rocksteady and Niko Ne Zna will also be there. Digital artist Jon Baxter is down from Auckland with his An Interactive World inside The Dowse and once …Events…

Big Day Dowse Sun 24 March 2013, 12–6pm | FREE

See you Sunday for Big Day Dowse with the Phoenix Foundation and Anika Moa. Local bands Newtown Rocksteady and Niko Ne Zna will also be there. Digital artist Jon Baxter is down from Auckland with his ‘An Interactive World’ inside The Dowse and once again Fuse Circus will be up to their crazy antics in Dowse Square. The Amazing Travelling Photobooth returns to prime position in the Dowse courtyard and there’ll also be activities for children, craft and food stalls food and more. Best of all, it’s all FREE. http://www.dowse.org.nz/en/Events/Events/Big-Day-Dowse/

Smash Palace Workshop Sun 7 April 2013, 10am-4pm | $175 per person
Design your own homemade jewellery out of broken china with Caroline and Jo from Smash Palace. Wear old clothes and an apron and bring some broken or chipped china with you. BYO lunch. All tools and afternoon tea provided. www.smashpalace.net Image attached – Jo and Caroline
BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL T 04 570 6500 E dowsebookings@huttcity.govt.nz

Talk & Tour: Alex Monteith Sat 13 April 2013, 1pm | FREE

Meet Auckland artist and adventurer Alex Monteith and hear the stories behind her new video work, Big Wave Aotearoa.

Opening Exhibition…

Alex Monteith: Big Wave Aotearoa 13 April – 28 July 2013 | FREE

Surf’s up at The Dowse with Auckland artist Alex Monteith exploring high performance surfing in this new video work. A collaboration with Doug Young and exponents of Aotearoa’s Big Wave Surfing community.

Alex Monteith is a new media artist and academic whose work incorporates sound, performance, photography, film, video, kinetic and network components, while her practice explores the politics, freedoms and limits of consumer technology. Her large-scale works involve collaboration with specialists from outside the art-world including sheep-dog triallists and New Zealand racing motor-cyclists.

No stranger to the surf community, for six years Monteith was a competitive surfer – she was the Irish National Women’s champion in 2001 and represented Ireland in the 2002 ISA world surfing games in Durban, South Africa and the European Surfing Championships in 2001. She has also competed on the NZ national circuit. (Alex Monteith was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and moved to New Zealand with her family in 1987.)

In 2001, Alex was nominated for New Zealand’s most prestigious art award, the Walters Prize, for Passing Manoeuvre. It featured two motorcycles and 584 vehicles in a two-channel video installation. This daring work documented two motorcyclists “lane-splitting” on Auckland’s Northern Motorway during morning rush hour traffic. The semi-illegal continuous passing manoeuvre took place from the Greville Road onramp, over the Auckland Harbour Bride, to the first city exit.

Image attached: Doug Young surfing Jaws, Hawaii. Image courtesy of Doug Young

Ongoing Exhibitions…

Myths, Monsters & Magical Things 9 March – 16 June 2013 | FREE
Discover bountiful beasts, fabulous fairies, elaborate elves and drowsy dragons in this new exhibition for children and their families. Featuring contemporary works that have myths, monsters, fantastical animals and magical creatures at their core, fairy tales and fables will take on a new light with characters inspired by a range of heroic journeys – from Maori taniwha to Irish leprechauns, Greek mythology to English legends. Works range from jewellery to sculpture and painting to photography, drawn mainly from The Dowse Collection, by New Zealand artists: Lisa Reihana, Dave Copeland, Jane Dodd, Johnny Fraser Allen, Cliff Whiting, Hannah & Aaron Beehre, Edward Duant and Bob Gerrard; as well as Australian artist Louise Weaver‘s hand-crocheted golden bunny New Romantic (Golden Hare) and Indian painter Shanti Devi’s The Bahagavad Gita.

Everyone Talks to Everyone 16 February – 9 June 2013 | FREE
Drawing together a range of media, including photography, sculpture and digital art, Everyone Talks to Everyone creates conversations that challenge the boundaries between decorative arts, design and contemporary art. The exhibition features works by New Zealand artists: Alvie McKree, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Niki Hastings-McFall, Sean Kerr, Selina Woulfe, Sofia Tekela-Smith, Suji Park, Johann Nortje and Vaimaila Urale. Everyone Talks to Everyone is curated by the 2012 Blumhardt Curatorial Intern, Ane Tonga, and takes place in the Blumhardt Gallery.

Everyone’s talking about our Material Girl Competition. Dowse visitors are asked to tell us about their favourite magical Madonna moment (it could be an anecdote, an image or a video) and be in to win a Sarah Maxey designed MINE bag full of artist Sean Kerr’s gorgeous books as well as goodies from MINE: The Dowse Shop. Entries can be emailed to museums@huttcity.govt.nz or posted on our Facebook page. Competition closes 9 June.

Retrospect: A Contemporary Jewellery Show 2 February – 26 May 2013 | FREE
Retrospect brings together the work of Peter Deckers, a well-known New Zealand jeweller, with twenty emerging and established contemporary jewellers, many of whom have been tutored by him or who have participated in projects with him. The show pays homage to Deckers and ‘gives back’ to him, as a mentor who has provided opportunity and inspiration for other jewellers.

MEDIA RELEASE: www.dowse.org.nz/en/News/Latest-News/Retrospect-A-Contemporary-Jewellery-Exhibition

Closing Exhibition…

Play 1 December 2012 – 1 April 2013 | FREE
‘The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.’ Plato. The Dowse will be awash with ‘lovely things’ this summer – stunning play furniture, playscapes and play-objects created by leading international designers will tempt design fanatics of all ages. The Silbery Longrun Season of Play features the work of world-renown design-heavyweights like Charles & Ray Eames, Enzo Mari, Verner Panton, Eero Aarnio as well as well-known companies like Bauhaus, Vitra, Magis and Sirch.

MEDIA RELEASE: www.dowse.org.nz/en/News/Latest-News/Come-and-Play-with-us-at-The-Dowse

Saskia Leek: Desk Collection 15 December 2012 – 14 April 2013 | FREE
With brown paper smoke pouring from its chimney, and a glimpse of a ghostly figure at the illuminated cloth window, Saskia Leek’s two metre cardboard caravan is by far the largest artwork in her new survey exhibition at The Dowse. In contrast, the title of the show, Desk Collection, stakes a claim for art that is intimate, hinting at the modest scale of Leek’s paintings and the fact that almost every one of them could have been produced at a desk. Desk Collection, which is also the name of a 2006 painting, features almost 60 of Leek’s artworks spanning 1994 to 2012.

“I never think about my works as being small, although they always have been. I paint them up close so they take up my whole view. I think of them as compact yet expansive, like a song or a book.” Saskia Leek

Desk Collection features works drawn from around New Zealand and Australia and from both public and private collections.

MEDIA RELEASE: http://www.dowse.org.nz/en/News/Latest-News/Saskia-Leek-Desk-Collection/
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