Monitor 3.0

Curated by Sean Kerr, Michelle Wang, and Jamie Hanton with a new commission by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane

Monitor 3.0 re-visits and updates Monitor, an exhibition of moving image work from Aotearoa and abroad curated by Sean Kerr and David Watson in 1996. This new exhibition builds on the original curatorial framework and includes three programmes: a programme of commissioned collaborative work by emerging New Zealand artists, a three-part programme of recent work by national and international moving image practitioners, as well as a selection of work from the original Monitor exhibition.

Monitor 3.0 features a commissioned collaborative moving image installation, As you come down by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane. In As you come down, Her and Keane embed the feelings of the build-up and empty lurch associated with this year as they find footing—post-university but pre-artist—into a series of installations that draw on fiction, humour, and the collaborative process. Think of a pendulum or a swing: there’s a point at which the person or object momentarily pauses, weightless, at its highest point, before gravity pulls them back, swinging to the next highest point, again and again. At the crux of the work is the phrase, “The time has come”, a theatrical announcement often employed as a rhetorical device in advertisements and by politicians that builds expectation but often leads to very little. Wooden periscopes overcomplicate the viewing of a comparatively simple collection of moving image works, ceramic devices appear functional but are, in reality, impractical, while displaced video and sound resonate uncertainty and discomfort.

As you come down runs until 24 January 2021, before Monitor 3.1 opens with the second commissioned collaborative moving image installation by Qianye Lin and Qianhe 'AL' Lin on 30 January 2021.

The first part of the screening programme features a selection of recent international moving image work by Dean Cross (AU), Karrabing Film Collective (AU), Paul Simon Richards (UK), and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (KR) curated by Michelle Wang. The second and third parts, curated by Jamie Hanton and Sean Kerr respectively, will open in 2021.

Accompanying these two new programmes is a selection of work from the original Monitor exhibition, including work by: Lisa Reihana and Ani O’Neill, Paul Redican, Nathan Pōhio, Ronnie van Hout, Leigh Houliston, Kirstin Lucas, and Laura Parnes.

We would like to thank Creative Clay Studio and Aridium Designs for the generous support in the making of As you come down.

Orissa Keane is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi, who graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts University of Canterbury in 2019 with a major in sculpture. With a focus on social commentary, Keane’s work is situated in material and process-based studies. Recent work has explored precariousness and precarity and the way these manifest tangibly and intangibly via social, design, and architectural conventions. By subverting and convoluting these conventions and pushing against constraints of the material subject, Keane interrogates purpose finding humour in redundancy.

Min-Young Her is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi whose work focuses on using viewer discomfort as a device to explore the tensions in human relationships and to test the limits of our communicative abilities. She often draws on her experiences as a Korean immigrant, growing up with a mix of cultures and learning to grapple with different modes of communication. Her’s immersive and interactive sculptural fibre arts abstract, and modernise traditional Korean sensibilities to create environments that ask viewers to face fear and uncertainty with empathy and productive catharsis. Her graduated from the University of Canterbury Ilam School of Fine Arts in 2019 with a major in sculpture.