Louisa Beatty, David Ed Cooper, Hollow Pony

Technologies are bound to fail. Screens crack, cables get shredded, old models are quickly replaced by newer ones, or things just don’t work as they should. A broad set of discourses and industries so optimistic in the claims they make—to make life better, easier, more efficient—and so embedded within capitalist logics of growth, innovation and progress cannot help but embarrass themselves when things go awry.

For Louisa Beatty and David Ed Cooper, there’s potential in failure. Deploying dry humour and improvisation, both artists alter, remake and reconfigure everyday technologies, playfully exposing the ideological mechanisms at play in the production of these objects, and motioning towards a radically altered relation to technology and the world.

Hollow pony is curated by Simon Gennard.

About the Artists:
Louisa Beatty currently lives in Pōneke Wellington. Working across media, she employs sound, video, sculpture and installation. Working with everyday objects and environments, Beatty elevates and reworks them into her multimedia practice embracing ingenuity and humour. She has a BFA(Hons) from Massey University Wellington. Previous exhibitions include Refurbish (with Aria McInnes and Jelly O’Shea), Hunters and Collectors, Pōneke, 2019; Circular Breathing, DIRT, Pōneke, 2018; Louisa Beatty, MEANWHILE, Pōneke, 2018.

Born in South Africa, based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, David Ed Cooper's practice in painting and sculpture is an ongoing exercise of what he calls a 'new bruxism'. A grinding of teeth; a compression of fiction in the mouth of capitalist realism and cultural homogeneity. What remains are the ghosts of our interactions and failures. To come; the hauntings of a possible future.

David graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2013. Previous exhibitions include Sometime, someday, when all is said and done (group), RM, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2019; fine moon, poor tuning (group), MEANWHILE, Pōneke Wellington, 2018; We didn’t feel like ourselves, Window, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2016; Double Negative, Loft Jervois, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2015; RE:400. (with James Wylie), Pilot, Kirikiriroa Hamilton, 2014; International Artists Initiated (with James Wylie), David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2013.

Hollow pony opens alongside Present Tense: Wāhine Toi Aotearoa, the last stop on a touring exhibition of posters by more than 100 women and non-binary designers, generated through an open call by Designers Speak (Up) earlier this year.

Image: Louisa Beatty, Local foley, 2019, digital video, still. Image courtesy of the artist.