External Exhibit 'Jealous Saboteurs' - Francis Upritchard

This is an overview - there is a more in-depth review in my critical reports on exhibitions:

This exhibit was hosted in the Wellington City Gallery. The Exhibit is primarily sculptural involving themes of ambiguity, with inspiration drawing from the utopian rhetoric of post-1960s counterculture, high modernist futurism and the twisted dreams of social exiles, millenarians, and survivalists.

Space:

This artist is exhibiting a large body of work spanning over 20 years of her career, therefore a large space is required to display these works with ample room for viewing and strictly no touching. In this way the City Gallery space suited the sheer amount of work. The work was well lit in white-cube oriented spaces, however it was separated into four different rooms which I felt made the flow a bit confusing. In addition, the signage for the work was not very obvious, the work was quite varied which meant occasionally I was unsure if it was all the same artist’s work or not, and I had to look out for text implying the creator of the work.

Art:

The exhibition contained an impressive body of work from Upritchard. Despite my discomfort about the space I was quite taken by the sculptural work and concepts, some of which contained quite strong metaphorical themes. Some felt eclectic, like an explorer’s collection of trophies or discovered items, another felt like tomb jars and the belongings of a mummy. In a way these were very different from the initial statues I saw in the first room with the jester-like sculptures, and other somewhat creepy figures. The explanation on both the wall and pamphlet discusses the artist’s implication of her works representing ambiguity through the figures possibly being either ‘wise men or imbeciles, from past, present, or future. Have they transcended history or been discarded by it?’ Upon looking at the sculptures I definitely picked up on this thematic, through the posture, faces and colouration of the work.