A Museum of Obsessions

Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) coined the term a ‘museum of obsessions’ to identify the space that artists occupy when they are driven by the intense individual energies of obsession to create their own intellectual and sensorial worlds. With the Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s A Museum of Obsessions curator Jodie Dalgleish will work with a large group of artists to investigate the evidence and manifestation of such creative obsession. The allure of the ‘obsessional object’, the often fundamental importance of the artist’s collection, and the generative potential of obsessive techniques and repetitive practice will be seen and heard from different angles in a range of works and installations.

Perhaps the most curious of objects will be a glass dome containing hair that has been cut from the head of Dunedin artist Michael Morley over the last twenty years and with which the artist references the fetishism of memorial objects and dark magic and makes a quasi-scientific record of a personal process of change. Highlighting the prospect of self-redefinition and artistic possession, Dunedin artist Angela Lyon’s collected images of Elvis as well as her own photographs and drawings of herself as the rock icon will tumble from the walls and into the gallery.

Artists Nigel Bunn (Dunedin) and Scott Flanagan (Christchurch) will show the curious and affective results of working obsessively with collected materials. Bunn, who collects obsolete audio, image making and scientific equipment of all kinds, has made a ‘machine’ to paint with the beauty of creative accidents that happen when working with such a unique instrument. Flanagan has painstakingly transformed anti-terrorist documents by weaving them into a large and ephemeral paper sail.

Other artists include Claire Beynon, David Clegg, Darren Glass, Jeff Henderson, Angela Lyon, Alex Mackinnon, Ben Pearce, James Robinson, and American artist Peter Wegner.

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