Nature danger revenge

Nature danger revenge is an exhibition of paintings by Alexis Hunter (1948-2014), which stem from a feminist and environmental consciousness of the 1980s, and new commissions from artists Evangeline Riddiford Graham, Deborah Rundle and Sorawit Songsataya. The exhibition takes Hunter’s paintings of hybrid creatures and environments—and their charged, even apocalyptic, language of expression—as heady ground to explore new horizons.

Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hunter spent much of her career in London. From the mid-1970s, she became internationally recognised for her photo-narratives that appropriated the language of commercial film and advertising to challenge gender and power relations. In the 1980s, she moved away from photography towards neo-expressionist painting. This remained Hunter’s primary artistic medium for the rest of her working life.

Graham, Rundle and Songsataya consider the agencies that exist between expression and environment in dialogue with a group of Hunter’s paintings following her shift in medium. In the audio installation Mother juggernaut (2022), Graham explores a ‘whiplash’ between linear historical narratives and the pluralities of lived experience; sculptural works by Rundle play with the metamorphoses of language and environment; and Crown Shyness, a video installation by Songsataya, employs point-cloud technology to map and reimage the vitality of Aotearoa’s tallest tree.

The exhibition will open with a public floor talk with Evangeline Riddiford Graham, Deborah Rundle and Sorawit Songsataya at 4pm this Saturday 2 July.
 

Noho ora mai
Sophie Davis
Kairauhī Curator, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

[image: ALEXIS HUNTER Creation 1987. Oil on canvas. Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa. Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. © Alexis Hunter. DACS/Copyright Agency, 2022.]