10 March - 12 June 2022
Closing Night 25 May, 6-8pm
Ground Floor Galleries
Presented in association with Auckland Arts Festival 2022
Adrift, out in our corner of the South Pacific, hemmed in by the sheer wild beauty of Aotearoa’s shores: we may have become blind to an impending global fate.
All flourish, all awe, all beauty, and any romantic sublime, may be subsumed under the eve of the climate crisis: it simultaneously calls our minds to order and draws us away from the experience of immediacy as we inhabit landscapes, paradoxically separating us from the stark datum of possible destruction at the very moment such abstracts are the most urgent. The last two winters here in Tāmaki Makaurau have been our hottest winters on record. Our house is on fire.
‘Some of the worst impacts will be in the Pacific,’ states a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which finds the world may warm by 1.5 degrees by the 2030s, much earlier than previously estimated.
And while the smoke of ‘denialism’ has morphed into the deep cynicism of ‘delayism’ we all now stand on the precipice of immense human folly. We all desperately need to pay attention.
With this new project John Reynolds mixes rainwater with acrylics, gallows humour with dead seriousness, and ponders the seemingly simple question, ‘are we there yet?’ Slogans and provocations quoting activists, notably Greta Thunberg, spill across a wordy array of paintings and placard installations. A major solo show, Smoke & Mirrors claims that creativity is activism, and has a vital role regarding catastrophic climate change.
Biography
John Reynolds lives and works in Auckland. Over the past three decades he has established a reputation as a painter who employs aspects of drawing and different types of representation for poetic effect. Not content to be pigeonholed as a painter, he also incorporates sculpture, installation and site-specific outdoor works into his practice. These include Snow Tussock and Golden Spaniard, commissioned by Oceana Gold for a heritage and art park in East Otago; BIG WAVE TERRITORY, commissioned by New Plymouth's Art in Public Places Trust for the Coastal Walkway; and One Hundred and Eighty-Nine Steps, Freyberg Place (with Isthmus Group), commissioned by the Auckland City Council.
Reynolds is also recognised for the diversity of his practice and ability to work in a variety of fields such as - architecture (with Nicolas Stevens), fashion (with Workshop, World and Karen Walker), music and publishing (record, book and magazine covers) and television (Questions for Mr Reynolds documentary with Shirley Horrocks and Works End with Chris Knox for Art Land).
John Reynolds is the recipient of a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand and a member of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Foundation. He has also been a finalist in New Zealand's prestigious Walters Prize Award and exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in 2002 and 2008.