The past few years have been busy ones for Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based artist Shannon Novak. He’s produced solo projects, like the multi-site Cultivate (2021) in Ngāmotu New Plymouth, and participated in group shows, such as Sympathetic Resonance (2019) at the Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson, and Queer Algorithms (2020) at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau. Francis...
These communities were also coming to terms with the fact that they were no longer a reviled minority and realised that, if they wished to keep an identity that had been created through legal and social oppression over the course of two centuries, they needed to work to maintain their unique culture and to remember its long history.[1] —David Herkt, 2013 Is this feeling optimism? It is certainly...
I recline on pieces of a knobbly kind of foam I think is used to soften ambient noise in recording studios. Beneath me is an expanse of printed water, doubled like a Rorschach blot. It flies up at my feet, begins to curl, and dissolves into a sheet of balloons, evocative of both sea spume and an end-of-night balloon drop in a club. A few of the globes are puckering. It’s May, and the party has...