NEW INTREPID LIFE FORMS EMANCIPATE QUEER DESIRES
Come witness alien contusions and rogue life growths crafted from excursions into the inner wilderness.
Through sculpture, sewing and song, we heal our wounds through creative abstraction, happening upon hope among chaos. These beings and their songs animate our individual experiences of queer joy and resistance. It’s a messy but vibrant menagerie embodying conflicting feelings of hope and grief.
Enjoy bathing among the raucous joyous chorus of creatures who will not be silenced.
Please join us to mark the opening of The little guys that come out of me: sit and listen to them, a new exhibition by Natasha and Ezra Munro and Lucky Pollock.
Through a “tag team” collaborative process spanning 12months, siblings Natasha and Ezra Munro crafted a series of elaborate and sometimes explicit beings from donated and found objects, clay, fabric and printed materials. Lucky Pollock and Natasha Munro then sonically responded to the creatures, with Lucky’s sound works being crafted on a Nintendo DS.
With the exhibition, the artists consider whether “the playful yet confronting nature of these creatures and their songs enable a more realistic depiction of queer expression. The aim of these works was to spark joy (and possibly shock), to grieve but also to play. Some of these beings are almost toy-like, but perhaps too confronting to quite be so. The bitcrushed sound of the Nintendo combined with Lucky’s hyperactive and frenetic compositional style amplify this feeling.”
Queer joy means living freely, openly and honestly in alignment with one’s emotions and desires. Unfortunately in our current world this also means embodying that which some simply repress, refuse to understand, or outright scrutinise. The creature-like creations of Ezra and Natasha do not gloss over the pain that is caused by this oppression, nor are they completely overwhelmed by it, integrating these conflicting aspects to become a dynamic gathering of symbolically hopeful life forms.
Opening: Thursday 8 October, 5.30pm with refreshments from Liberty Breweries
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 4pm
Closes: Saturday 21 November
Ezra Munro is an Ōtepoti-based artist who uses a mixture of technological and physical acts of distortion. Translucent photographs serve as a tool to showcase a blend of both photography and Photoshop to manipulate biotechnological pairings.
https://www.instagram.com/fleshhhive/
Natasha Munro Hurn is a Tāmaki Makaurua based artist that explores utopian trans-punk ideology through an experimental screen print and installation practice. She seeks to find unapologetic practices of mess within an explosive hybrid of photographic-based collages of herself and her environment, fabric print work and hectic found object sculptures. Through this practice of mess she hopes to conjure up a healing euphoria for both herself and the various trans communities that exist within Aotearoa. Natasha has recently just finished her Master of Visual Arts at AUT in mid 2025.
https://www.instagram.com/utopia_for_sale/
Lucky Pollock is a musician and multi-instrumentalist whose compositional work ranges from notated music to experimental improvisation and electronic and popular music genres. They perform under the name of beet-wix, making music on a nintendo DS and have an ambient solo folk project called lucky omen, and have had classical compositions performed by the NZSO and NZ Trio. They are based in Te Whanganui-a-tara where they moved after completing their Bachelor of Music at Otago University in Ōtepoti in 2023.
https://www.instagram.com/beetwix4breakfast/
https://beet-wix.bandcamp.com/