Showcase 2023
Showcase 2023, our final exhibition of the year, is an exhibition of new works by artists represented by City Art Depot.
Olivia Chamberlain is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist. Bold but balanced, her painting tilt represents the continuation of her explorations into the overlapping concerns of vibrant colour, shape and composition. Meticulously finished, the hard edges of the structures within this work lock together, reminiscent of shapes found in the modern cityscape.
Richard Elderton is a Te Waipounamu South Island-based painter whose bicultural upbringing has led to a particular fascination with 19th century Japonism and wayo secchu. In his diptych 水繁吹–Waterfall he explores ideas of transience and impermanence, rushing water is suspended with impasto brushwork, abstracting the fleeting light and movement through each piece.
Katie Hayles is an Ōtautahi-based painter and recent honours graduate from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. In her painting Glimmer, she says, she “attempts to locate myself in the ‘now’ and paint only what is ‘real’. Capturing the experience of being present and our comprehension of space.” She hopes to allow the viewer “to encounter the boundaries of self-perspective”.
Ivan Lupi (born 1972, Ferrara, Italy), is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist. These seemingly unrelated pieces, he says, “are instead connected as a body of work exploring feelings towards my personal history. As an immigrant dealing with memory, travel, returning and family, each piece is an attempt to answer to my ghosts, whilst building an ephemeral mausoleum in which I can take refuge and mourn.”
Lisa Patterson is Lyttelton-based artist. Her two pieces reference a deep bleeding cut she experienced in the initial making of these works. She says the splatters of her blood “reminded me of several things: how important hands are, how we must always take more care than we think with what we do with them, and how despite this I inevitably sustain a hand injury during every project I undertake!” The hands, droplets and pools are made with molten lead poured into open sand moulds which lends further elements of unpredictability to the pieces. “That seems,” she says, “to be some sort of illustration of the nature of making in general!”
Francis van Hout is an Ōtautahi Christchurch based-artist. His artwork Victory over the Sun, like all of his work, contains multitudes of references and thoughts. The work references the 1913 Russian Futurist opera of that name, for which Kazimir Malevich, who painted the renowned black square painting, designed the stage and costumes. The painting also reminds him, writes Francis, of “a large Christmas tree bauble”, “a gold
foil wrapped space craft, used to protect the craft from the sun/ radiation” and the use of gold as a symbol of worship in Aztec/Mayan sun worship and Russian icon paintings.
Shannon Williamson is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist. Her practice is dominated by her love of drawing. Using pencil, watercolour and gouache, drawings are pseudo-maps of bodily experience implying a delicate futility in the human quest for order and purpose. In Family portrait (sick day) the relationship with her own body reactions and to the family are expressed in mottled colour and fragile lines.
