You are warmly invited to the opening of Introduced Birds, an exhibition by the artist collective ffffff on Tuesday 7 September at 5:30pm.

Introduced Birds consists of a series of interlinked environments that conjure up a nervous tension and feeling of barren isolation. Visitors become performers are as they move through three minimalist environments, activating the space with movement and sound. Their psychological terrains tap into an undercurrent of individual alienation and anxiety symptomatic of the mechanisms of contemporary socialisation.

Blue Oyster Art Project Space | www.blueoyster.org.nz |

Ph 03 479 0197,

 Basement, 24b Moray Place |

 PO Box 5903, Dunedin 9058

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 12pm-3pm

The Blue Oyster is supported by Creative New Zealand | Toi Aotearoa and Dunedin City Council | Kaunihera-a-rohe o Otepoti

milford galleries queenstown

  4 - 29 September 2010 

Preview & Artist Talks 5:30pm Friday 3 Sept

9A Earl Street, Queenstown, New Zealand,  Ph (03) 442 6896

    Gallery Hours:  Everyday 10am to 6pm

 images  and more details at

 www.milfordgalleries.co.nz/

 In Memory Of

Christopher Hartley Meder

10/07/1971 - 17/07/2010

At The Blue Oyster Art Project Space on Tuesday 13 July at 5:30pm for the opening of Media Povera | Nigel Bunn: three works | KF Pieters: magnet. The shows will run until 7 August.

Media Povera: Brett Ian Balogh, Radio Cegeste, Ryan Cockburn, Edie Eves, Helga Fassonaki, Alexander MacKinnon. Curated by Sally Ann McIntyre

Providing its own eclectic take on the "media formerly known as new", Media Povera groups together artists based in New Zealand, Greece, Australia and the USA. An exhibition that groups together artistic strategies emerging from hybrid investigations in the contemporary, audio, media and transmission arts, together these works foreground the materiality of the media object in the age of digital immateriality, while remaining mindful of its agency within systems of production and distribution - as Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham have identified in their book "Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media" media are best understood not as materials but as "behaviors" - participatory, performative or generative.

Media Povera presents a series of artistic investigations into synaesthesic sound-image translation, transmission as a museological space, the afterlife of obsolete formats, and technology as a craft medium. These artists run record labels, reconfigure sound objects as silent paintings, leave answering machine messages from radiophonic ghosts, and make anti-spectacular technologies which are simple, vulnerable, and transparent. Whether their focus is on technology from a "do-it-yourself" perspective, ways of making that are critical of current consumer technologies, or references to technological and art histories that look at the media object as something that's not a series of points on a timeline, but a cloud of possibilities always available for interrogation, with their hybridizing of newer and older technologies, together these works cast a critical eye over the subject of the sonic object's disappearance and its relation to systems of cultural exchange.

[Image credit: Alex Mackinnon Vanitas]

Nigel Bunn: three works

Nigel Bunn's investigations into the participatory potential of technology are often characterized by a destabilization of the methodological and rigorous position of the scientist with the play and poetics of artistic curiosity. For this exhibition the artist provides insight into the breadth of his hybrid media projects, with tools designed and built to create moving and still images, and graphic sound-image translation, presented together with the works that emerge from them - showing the product as/in process, and the tradition of the oily rag reconfigured as an empire of possibilities. 

[Image credit: Nigel Bunn Gestetner Recording]

KF Pieters: magnet

Pieters' long experiment in marrying improvised music with moving image begins in the live forums of experimental music culture, and moves towards the installation space's potential to engage with durational viewing, and the sublime, near-painterly spaces of long-take cinema. In this collaboration with Wellington's Seht / Stephen Clover, the image is twinned with sound to produce immersively liminal space for the viewer / listener to find a sensorial flow within. Pieters considers magnet to be "a fine example of the direct time-image theorized by the philosopher gilles deleuze, one dimension of which is the placing of at least two autonomous terms  beside each other.  para beside paradeigma paradigme meaning literally "what shows itself beside"))    here a sound image and a visual image are shown beside each other.  the cinematic action/reaction relationship is absent between the two. this does not mean that a relationship does not exist but its qualities are particular and are not predetermined. this incommensurability forms a field of unactualized possibilities.  a space such as this is an offering, it could call one up to activate ones own thinking And each time..... attention needs to be paid. one need not pay attention. there is nothing presupposed here, least of all, of course          your attention."

[Image credit: KF Pieters magnet]

Please join The Blue Oyster Art Project Space on Tuesday 15 June 2010 at 5:30pm for the opening of Nice to meet you Eddie Clemens and Simon Lawrence.

Having studied together in Christchurch over a decade ago, Eddie Clemens and Simon Lawrence have always perceived an affinity in their approaches to art making. They nevertheless take very different trajectories and always end up in very different places. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity for them to set their works on a collision path. Within the confines of the Blue Oyster gallery spaces they will test out intersecting hypotheses and conduct pseudo-scientific experiments, in what may appear to be entirely parallel universes.

For this exhibition Clemens has developed new works which draw on the subtle and often inexplicable motifs that echo through his work. Clemens' use of simple processes to transform mundane objects and components into animated, idiosyncratic sculptures, will be familiar to those who saw his work while he was in Dunedin as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. Picking up a thread from his show Delusional Architecture - which was presented at the at Hocken Collections gallery at the culmination of his fellowship - Clemens' sculptures hone in on the suggestive potential and wit of simple artifice, yet retain their subtlety with seemingly incongruent references.

Hailing from Christchurch, Simon Lawrence creates installations using contraptions and videos that begin with odd instances of science fiction, supernatural activity and entirely fictitious occurrences. With new works tailored to the cavernous industrial spaces of the Blue Oyster, Lawrence's allusions roam with guile from the mythical history of the black swan to fault-filled mechanisms that behave in unexpected ways.

With their open-ended configurations Clemens and Lawrence provoke a search for connections and explanations that always rest unattainably out of reach. The show will run until Saturday 10 July.

Artist's Talk:  Sunday, 6 June at 3pm. FREE ENTRY

Exhibition dates: 

Saturday, 29 May 2010 to Sunday, 19 September 2010