Sumer is pleased to present its latest exhibition MEATWARE. The show brings together a group of practitioners from New Zealand, Australia, and the United States; included are works by Simon Denny, Lewis Fidock & Joshua Petherick, Yolunda Hickman, Jess Johnson & Simon Ward, Andrew McLeod, Luke Libera Moore, Sean Peoples, and Yvonne Todd.
Coinciding with the opening of Jess Johnson & Simon Ward's major exhibition Terminus at the Tauranga Art Gallery, the intention of MEATWARE is to present a series of works which complement this large museum installation in recognition of Jess Johnson, arguably the most significant artist to have come out of Tauranga.
As with Johnson & Ward, the artists featured in MEATWARE create works that actively reflect our current technocentric paradigm. Their various practices responding to a world as comprised of a series of complex systems - a world of confounding paradoxes and aporias. Cave systems, dungeons and labyrinths, voids and non-spaces are spatial constructs recurrent in the works; and their actors range from the malevolent to the comical and bizarre.
Critics have recently applied a plethora of designations for similar such work, including 'postmedia' [1], 'postinternet' [2], or most recently, 'sustainable aesthetics' [3]; and while the definitions of such terms vary according to the argument of its respective author, what they all similarly describe is art with a distinctly contemporary aesthetic sensibility, and approach in the treatment of subject, space, and narrativity.
The reality, or lived experience, that they reflect is one layered, mediated, and augmented; one of temporal and spatial ambiguity. They are works which meld fantasy-fiction with the quotidian, and negotiate a space which oscillates between the personal-private and ubiquitous, and geo-political.
[1] The Postmedium Perspective, Rhizome, Domenico QuarantaJan 12, 2011.
[2] What's Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?, Rhizome, Michael Connor, November 1st, 2013.
[3] The New Whitney Biennial Made Me See Art History in a New Way, Vulture, Jerry Saltz, May 14, 2019
In association with Ashes/Ashes, Ivan Anthony, Michael Lett,
Robert Heald Gallery, Sydney & STATION