The Art of May

There is so much going on this May, tune your visual senses to the pollen of paint and hand-crafted energy. Discover the full gamut of artworks to accompany this month’s curated selection below.

Fresh Gallery Otara

To Live + Die in South Auckland

Vasemaca Tavola

4 May – 15 June

Vasemaca Tavola is a Fijian-Pākehā visual artist interested in the genre of social practice and the socio-political positioning of art in society.

To Live + Die in South Auckland coincides with the gallery’s 18th anniversary, of which the artist is a founding curator. In this solo exhibition Tavola explores the ways South Auckland has shaped her life since arriving from Fiji at the age of 19. Reflecting on the spaces’ founding energies and offering a new way to perceive South Auckland, its complexities, and its superpowers.

5/46 Fair Mall, Ōtara Town Centre
vasemacatavola.com

Melanie Roger Gallery

Afternoon Sun

Kirstin Carlin

1 May – 25 May

Kirstin Carlin’s solo exhibition, Afternoon Sun, brings together a new series of larger scale “invented” garden paintings created in her highly developed visual shorthand: paintings with quick brushstrokes, vivid colours, and shifting perspectives which are visually rich and complex.

Embracing the changing nature of the garden, the paintings move from figuration to abstraction and include recurring motifs and loosely rendered flora that vibrate on the picture plane. Her use of one-of-a-kind colour and distinctive brush marks conjure up painting’s history.

444 Karangahape Rd, Newton
melanierogergallery.com

Masterworks Gallery

Ceramics of Unease & Bead Up

John Parker; Various Artists

4 May – 1 June

Masterworks is hosting two exhibitions simultaneously: Ceramics of Unease a solo show by John Parker, and Bead Up, a Group Exhibition of multidisciplinary artists who have created jewellery in celebration of the humble bead.

In Ceramics of Unease, Parker presents a new series of ceramic vessels in which he strives to create the perfect shape. These objects are devoid of the ‘makers touch’ which identifies most studio ceramics, yet these pieces are handmade, with every detail and mark attended to by the artist.

71 Upper Queen Street, Newton
masterworksgallery.co.nz

Sanderson Contemporary

Rewilding the Garden

Molly Timmins

15 May – 9 June

In Rewilding the Garden, Timmins presents the garden abstracted: through wild and jagged dollops of paint, a Bromeliad leaf or Ponga frond emerges, before dissipating back into ‘well gardened’ brush marks. Letting the paint lead, these artworks reimagine the garden outside of any hierarchy, as its own entity and as a tangible idea led by the imagination.

Osborne Lane, 2 Kent Street, Newmarket.
sanderson.co.nz

The Upstairs Gallery

Enersefrequence

Sean Hill

3 May – 19 May

Enersefrequence is a combination of three words: energy, sequence and frequency combining to create one singular word. In this solo show, Hill presents works that individually represent each of these words but also combine as a Enersefrequence within the exhibition space. Sean Hill is a Taranaki-based multidisciplinary artist of Samoan/NZ European descent. His works are process-aware, and full of movement, colour and texture.

Lopdell House, 418 Titirangi Road, Titirangi.
upstairs.org.nz

Little Rosie

Queen Tide

Hannah Melville-Maurice

5 May – 31 May

A collection of works which are water marked or rather, marked by water, celebrating the cycles and our intrinsic part in and of them. 

This latest series by Melville-Maurice draw on the artists’ somatic and mythical experience of being alive. Her voluptuous and richly layered figures cast dew dropped and prickly stemmed narratives that bloom and fade, in seed and sea.

Rejoicing in the liquid nature of her medium, Melville-Maurice creates paintings infused with earth energies, influenced by magical traditions and folklores, intersectional feminism, a keen appreciation of weather systems, a bittersweet love of Holocene era seasons, and a huge love for moon and sea.

82 Gladstone Road, Parnell
Instagram: @honeymoonseastudio

Bergman Gallery

Fa’aliga – Beneath the Surface

Siliga David Setoga, Sefton Rani, Sean Hill, Iokapeta Magele-Suamasi, Raymond Sagapolutele

2 May – 25 May

A collection of works which are water marked or rather, marked by water, celebrating the cycles and our intrinsic part in and of them. 

This latest series by Melville-Maurice draw on the artists’ somatic and mythical experience of being alive. Her voluptuous and richly layered figures cast dew dropped and prickly stemmed narratives that bloom and fade, in seed and sea.

Rejoicing in the liquid nature of her medium, Melville-Maurice creates paintings infused with earth energies, influenced by magical traditions and folklores, intersectional feminism, a keen appreciation of weather systems, a bittersweet love of Holocene era seasons, and a huge love for moon and sea.

82 Gladstone Road, Parnell
Instagram: @honeymoonseastudio