Exhibition Opening | Esther Deans, Jane Venis, Jenna Packer

About the event

Join us for the opening of three new exhibitions on Saturday 26 October at 6pm.

Esther Deans’ thesis exhibition An Iconography of Doubt is an accumulation of ideas and imagery from four years of study towards her PhD through the Auckland University of Technology. This research was a personal investigation into her experiences and preoccupations, including ideas about eschatology, time, literature, art history, memory, and nature. In these works she draws on novels, films, and everyday structures to create an iconography that responds to personal and collective disaster.

In Pāua Play, Jane Venis has hand-built a variety of instruments that incorporate the culturally potent material of pāua shell. Both the ukelele and pāua have been historically devalued within the Pacific – sold as cheap and kitschy tourist souvenirs, which has exploited their status as taonga for their respective cultures. Here, Jane combines the two to produce contemporary Kiwiana, and along with other instruments, forms an ensemble that evaluates where the line might lie between trinket and treasure.

Jenna Packer's exhibition Toro looks back at over a decade of utilising the bull as a symbol, one commonly associated with free market economics: the logos of financial companies, the bull statue at Wall Street, or the term ‘bull market’. Packer’s work incorporates this symbol as a literal structure; as monoliths built by speculative future societies, or as totems encountered in an imagined past.

Nau mai koutou katoa - All are welcome at the opening of these exhibitions, and light refreshments will be provided.

Image: Jane Venis, Pāua Trip, 2024, HD video still. Image courtesy of Hannah Joynt.