The photographs in the series Homewardbounder show the entrances to ‘adits’, or horizontal mineshafts, left in the West Coast landscape after exploration by gold miners during the 1860s gold rush. These dark, damp spaces convey a history of aspiration and struggle, as the men that sought to make their fortune there faced harsh realities: an unforgiving landscape, difficult working conditions and a hand to mouth existence.  

From the luxury Comme des Garçons concept store to Enjoy Gallery, Jade Townsend brings a selection of LED light works developed during her recent three-month residency in Beijing, China. Exploring the interplay between human values and the material world, the works focus on the construction of ‘taste’, reflecting the language of consumerist trends and the incredible vibrancy encountered in Beijing.

This is a site-specific project that excavates several overlapping areas of interest:

1. The complex histories of Wellington's Puke Ahu (Mt Cook), less visible than the site’s dominant narrative – war commemoration.

2. The potential for contemporary artists to catalyse conversation and contribute cultural value, in responding to a carefully controlled government site of remembrance.

Harboured is a real time exchange between the Port of Duluth and the Port of Auckland–respectively the artist’s hometown and the city in which the artist is establishing a new life. A personal narrative interweaves with issues of contemporary immigration–finding comfort in familiarity, navigating vast physical and emotional distances, integrating into a new society.

Soundtrack to viewing:

This is an object of installation.
(exhibition. consternation. inhibition)

A group exhibition featuring new work by Tanu Gago, Leilani Kake and Luisa Tora

Curated by members of the Enjoy Trust, Loaded explores the cultural weight of materiality by bringing together a group of antipodean artists that over the past two-decades have utilised various material surfaces to convey a(n often highly-charged political) message. Stripped of traditional iconography, these works—covered in excrement, gold, nail polish, plaster, oil, enamel and bark—offer rich and beautiful surfaces and textures, evoking a whole world of complex relationships beneath if one only cares to look.

Some plans are carried out, others never happen, only ever existing as intentions, drawing, models and artist impressions. In July there was an occupation – a modest intervention. One car park co-opted in the car space below Enjoy. From the imagined to a reality – a version of anyway. It's gone now but don’t worry if you missed it, it will be back, brought into this space, re-presented for you.

Ebbing Tagaloa features a series of Tagaloa (Polynesian god of the ocean) figures that reference the nineteen beaches and bays of Wellington by Paula Schaafhausen.

Showcasing a range of techniques and processes used in contemporary photography, Two photographers presents a selection of photographs from Breckon’s Real State series alongside new works in the Covenant cut-outs series by Shaun Waugh. Both bodies of work explore ideas around place, shelter and protection, through physical or digital manipulation of the image.

News stories overwhelm other news stories, events oust each other from the headlines and ten second items are squeezed out of hourly news bulletins by other things happening in other places. As shrinking mobile devices and expanding networks continually reconfigure our relationships to these events, the role of “the citizen” as participant, reporter and observer takes on new meanings. The Screen features two video works that test the ability of news media to traverse the misalignments of a world somehow made both bigger and smaller by network technology.

Throughout its history abstract painting has been deployed in the service of diverse agendas across the political spectrum. More recent revelations of the CIA's covert promotion of Abstract Expressionism—in order to bolster the ideology of western capitalism during the Cold War—have prompted a further reframing of abstract painting, its language and potential meanings.

The design of chess pieces has evolved slowly over the centuries, and in the 20th century artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy and Yayoi Kusama applied themselves to the problem of designing new chess forms.  In Orthogonal/Diagonal LA based artist Nova Jiang uses regional variants of chess found in Asia and elsewhere as seeds for digitally generating 3D printed playable games.

In Pier Paulo Pasolini’s 1966 film The Hawks and the Sparrows, a father and son wander through the outskirts of Rome when they meet a talking Marxist crow. The crow not only instructs them on some of the tenets of Marxist ideology, but also tells them a fable about two Franciscan friars who are charged with the responsibility of devising a way of communicating with the hawks and the sparrows. While the friars succeed in preaching to each species separately, their attempt at bringing the birds together fails.

The often overlooked spaces of industrial areas and failed development sites are examined in Auckland artist Talia Smith’s first solo exhibition, Lead us outside, lead us out Quietly at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington. Through photography, video and a publication the exhibition examines what happens to such spaces when their intended function is abandoned.

Exploring the perceptual effect of colour, light and space, Open Facade occurs in the conceptually overlapping; inside and outside, space and form. The work mediates, rather than separates these notions, asking the viewer for holistic consideration.

Helen Calder is a New Zealand artist whose work explores colour, extending the idea of the monochrome and bringing it from a contemplative colour field into a physical engagement.  Colour influences the way we interact with objects and spaces, and Calder’s recent work seeks to bring this phenomenon into a tangible, mindful experience.  Her use of red in Qualia 760-620λ draws from research which shows that the colour can raise the pulse and give the impression that time is passing faster than it really is.

Since the end of December, Kirsten Dryburgh and Xin Cheng have been working through a self-directed art-making bootcamp at Enjoy. 

Headcount comprises works by a group of contemporary artists using photography: Peter Madden, Richard Orjis, Greg Semu and Christian Thompson. All four artists have worked in the Pacific, or with Pacific themes, and in various ways have engaged the baroque and its iconographies. Headcount uses the theories of Mieke Bal’s Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, as one starting point to consider how the quotation of the Baroque can influence our interpretations of artworks in both the past and the present.

"It is impossible to say what an individual is doing unless we have tacitly accepted the essentially arbitrary modes of interpretation that social tradition is constantly suggesting to us from the very moment of our birth. Let anyone who doubts this try the experiment of making a painstaking report of the actions of a group of natives engaged in some activity, say religious, to which he has not the cultural key. If he is a skilful writer, he may succeed in giving a picturesque account of what he sees and hears, or thinks he sees and hears, but the chances of his being able to give a relation of what happens, in terms that would be intelligible and acceptable to the natives themselves, are practically nil"

Edward Sapir quoted in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of culture, (Walnut Creek, C: AltaMira Press, 1992) 571