Lost In the Air

Ana Iti, Ellyse Randrup, Gregory Kan and Sarah Maxey.

Curated by Chloe Geoghegan.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rain or shine.

Four local and independent artists with complex, new and enduring relationships to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington have collaborated to create two encounters or readings of the urban nature of Te Aro, central city Wellington. Chloe Geoghegan asked these four creative practitioners to collaborate, creating dual readings of the city, and new ways for Wellingtonians to navigate the creative fabric of the city.

Ana Iti often brings text into her work as a visual artist to explore narrative. For one side of the light boxes, she tells the story of Waimapihi, a bubbling stream / awa buried below Wellington—lost but not forgotten. Currently based in Europe, young Wellington designer Ellyse Randrup delicately illuminates this story with a new typeface based on Iti’s text. She imagines this text being gradually etched away under the street surface as a misty memory of the stream.

On the other side of the lightboxes, Gregory Kan’s prose about Wellington emotively captures this complicated, bustling and populated urban environment. Kan’s text imagines people passing each other by on the street, the wind whipping up around them, capturing their many thoughts and feelings, to be lost in the air and in the moment. Designer Sarah Maxey overlays Kan’s texts on her photographic interventions - cyanotypes taken just around the corner on Cuba Street, illustrating a place for Kan’s words to live within.

Iti, Randrup, Kan, and Maxey find ways to seek and disrupt moments of ambiguity and familiarity through the minutiae of life, bringing these imaginative, everyday and random encounters of the street to reveal the city’s own graphic language.