East Gallery
Peter Rive
Translations is a selection of paintings from 2017-2024, sourced from private collections between Tokyo and Auckland. Drawing on lived experiences and influences between East and West, Peter Rive has always used a diverse range of materials and techniques in his work; traditional and industrial paints, digital media and print. A central theme in his work has been an exploration of the painted mark or brushstroke, inspired by the rich Japanese tradition and also by the dynamic history of European painting. Painting in its purest form is an exploration of seeing. Rive approaches making art in a way that challenges the traditional order and process of what a painting is, and how it is made. Surfaces, marks and textures of material are at times re-presented and expanded through print, shifting across new canvases, mediums and layers of time. Each of these works is in itself, a translation.
This exhibition interrogates painting as form, exploring the moment of it’s application and challenging boundaries of scale, material and idea - how a painting is created, seen and experienced. After growing up in Waitakere on Auckland’s West coast, Peter Rive moved with his family and spent his formative teenage years and early twenties living on the North Shore. It was from here, he caught the ferry to the city to attend the Elam School of Fine Arts, and graduated with a BFA in 2001. He has exhibited artwork in New York, Tokyo and Auckland and worked on projects and collaborations with boutique fashion labels, product design and large stage productions. He has been selected as finalist in multiple national art awards, including the Parkin Prize, BMW Emerging Artist Award and the National Painting and Printmaking Award, and has work in private art collections internationally. He currently lives and works from his studio in western Tokyo.
Su Nelson
Su is a Canadian-born multi-media visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her art practice explores the inter-worlds of materiality, psychology, and relational pluralities.
Passionate about championing an authentic creative process as a means of revealing the unconscious she playfully manipulates a wide range of materials including bronze, wood, plasticine, hair, wax, clay, yarn, paper, and even hard candy – and pushing things around between 3D and 2D realms. Exploring the micro/macro relationships to self/collective, conscious/unconscious, nature’s systems, and human history is in the background of everything she creates.
Her arts training includes early faux finishing studies at the Valerie Skemp Decorative Arts Studio (Canada), various extensive specialty fine arts workshops at The Vancouver Academy of Art, a Creative Studies Certificate from The Otago Polytechnic School of Art (Dunedin), a Masters in Arts Management (1st Class Hons) at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design (Auckland), and a Postgrad Diploma in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.
Louise McCrae
My young life was spent on isolated land in the Kaipara Harbour riding the coast with the birds, imagining my world. Years later, I became interested in the material aspects of making and imagination, and how materials operate and their moments of failure. There is a visible link between the process of making and the process of living, one that opens up a re-imagination. The challenge of following curiosity tips into vulnerability and reduces into another kind of knowledge system or wisdom. Satisfaction comes when the elements alchemise, and the work takes on its own intention, generating more than the sum of its parts, generating a new imagination. LM
Louise is interested in parallel material investigations between living and making. She plays out various challenges, seeking confusion and allowing vulnerability and satisfaction in the things she makes. The moment that material fails, the edge of collapse, and the potential of change, is her mode of inspiration and point of entry.
Ultimately Louise pushes her materials towards failure as a way to capture the balance between disaster and transformation.
Louise holds a Master of Fine Art from Whitecliffe College of Art & Design, Auckland, New Zealand