Zhoe Granger – Episode
Conversation riding down arbitrary streams, snaking towards final exhaustion.
Every device is so draining, another quip-pro-quo. Fast jokes and cute anecdotes, delusional and convoluted after too many free beers. I am more interested in hearing about your personal life anyway.
Language is a system we exploit and re-wrap around things. Words communicate and tumble into chaotic knots of imagery. Uncomfortable and dumb we attempt to encapsulate emotion, as words thin us down removing the substance.
From a discussion about the weather to charming a collector at a show, we are at the mercy of banal conversational structures, always laced with the possibilities of animalistic whim.
Zhoe Granger (Born 1988, Palmerston North) is an Auckland based artist and founding member of Personal Best Gallery, an artist run initiative. This venture led to the conception of PBPR an ongoing collaborative partnership. She completed her postgraduate study at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2011.
Sorawit Songsataya – Jacques
Jaques was one of the gentlemen. She studied microbes, unicellular fungi, and the survival strategies of single-cell organisms; all of which have an amazing ability to organise themselves into other colonies with larger structures. What distinguishes a single-cell organism from other, more complex forms, is one of the many questions that occupies her waking hours, though fungi are her passion.
Fungi include moles, mushrooms, yeast and the like and have adopted a variety of survival strategies. For the most part they absorb energy-rich nutrients from their surroundings especially from living or decaying organisms. In the fungi family, mushrooms are the only species that rely primarily on sexual reproduction. Some fungi help decompose dead organisms and transform rocks into soil. She also studies plants. Plants consume carbon dioxide and water and produce sugar and oxygen as a result. Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont conducted a five-year tree experiment, which proved that all of the tree’s mass must have come from air and water rather than the soil. By growing a tree in a pot for five years he discovered, that after this five-year period, while 10% of the soil disappeared, the tree mass and weight had increased rapidly.
Sorawit Songsataya is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at The University of Auckland. Working primarily in moving image, 3D rendering and editing software, his interests lie in the effects digital technology has on cultural production; the way knowledge can be acquired and shared.
Special thanks to Coopers and Creative New Zealand for their support.
Opening Thursday 7 November, 5.30pm start
7-30th November