The Poetic Condition opens on Dec 7th, 2016

“The Poetic Condition |
De Dichterlijke Aard” looks at today’s big questions as an aesthetic exercise. All works by the nine Dutch artists explore, respond or extend the theme of our human nature and the relevance of the aesthetic of poetic intervention to the self, socio-political or society. They use a wide range of media and approaches to ‘big questions’ (who are we, how do we live, how do we think about others or relate to the news), so that the exhibition as a whole is like an installation encompassing diversities of vision. Some artworks are poetic selections relating to contemporary news, such as Channa Boon’s video or Christian van Tol’s drawings. Others take images associated with ‘the other’ culture or people and relate them to the personal, such as Inge van Reisberman’s photo-triptych and Anne Wellmer’s videos. Martje Zandboer’s suspended miniatures, which contain family photographs from the Dutch East Indies, mix Dutch colonial history with the theme of the personal and intergenerational. Thom Vink’s works take a more material versus human spirit perspective, where architectural models and photographs create a composite humane aesthetic, while Sanne Maes’ self-portrait video/drawing connects the self with the natural world. Pietertje van Splunter’s videos are like a poetics on the mundane: housework. Her brooms seem animated by an unearthly force and the constant stacking of the differing tribes of kitchen utensils suggests a game with secret rules. In using humour with the overkill her videos are reminders that the everyday domestic, is also a microcosm of the amusing, perhaps necessary banality of habit. Sonja van Kerkhoff’s photographic works pose questions focussed on an object–subject that is extended beyond the domestic, where an image of a baby is extended into the three dimensional incorporating philosophical slogans.
The five New Zealand artists, Lisa Clunie, Ellie Smith, Marg Morrow, Megan Dickinson and Elektra Bakhshov have been asked to respond to the theme, The Poetic Condition as well as to the various ways the Dutch works push the boundaries of the photographic medium.

The Poetic Condition | De dichterlijke Aard
The Shutter Room
7 Rust Avenue (opposite the public library entrance)
Whangarei

7 Dec – 14 January 2017
Wed-Fri: 12 noon – 4p.m., Sat: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.