Mark Braunias: Field of Vision
28 June, 2016 - 4 September, 2016
Main Galleries
Mark Braunias, Viewfinders (1994), Enamel on paper attached to board
Mark Braunias: Field of Vision comprises various themes, as well as details about the working processes of Mark Braunias from 1989 to 2016, giving prominence to selected works from the Arts Trust Collection and the artist’s personal archives. The exhibition is divided into chronological order through the various rooms of Pah Homestead culminating in a work-in-progress on the gallery wall itself (to be completed during the exhibition’s time frame).
At the core of his work Braunias deals with notions of identity. This often manifests itself in acute and humorous social observations and a hybrid of biological/mechanical transformations, all in various stages of evolution/devolution. Satire underpins much of Braunias’ work, though his figures and forms often reveal a strange pathos suggesting a longing to co-exist in a world, or worlds, of uncertainty. His work comprises a variety of media and genres; painting, drawing and animation, and has often been installation-based. He has also collaborated with various artists over the past 17 years and a number of these collaborations are featured in the exhibition.
Including paintings from the early 1990s of biomorphic figures whose confronting bulging eyes appeared to question and make tangible, the very act of the gallery visitor’s viewing and ‘seeing,’ the inclusion of paintings from this series like Viewfinders (1994), were formative to the direction Braunias’ iconography would take over the following decade.
Scrutinizing the curious nature of our behaviours in these and many other works, in Field of Vision Braunias returns the favour through disclosures about his work with the inclusion of pages from many of his drawing books in digital form on an interactive computer screen. It is an intriguing proposition as drawing is Braunias’ most active modus operandi in his processes of arriving at ideas, visually and conceptually. These unseen workbook sketches are in many ways the ‘drawings’ towards his drawings. The viewer will be able to chart his methodologies through workbooks that reveal the evolution integral to the serial nature of his work, with the temporal wall painting proposed as the last work in the show, attempting to pull many of these threads together and hint at future developments.
About the Artist:
Braunias graduated with a BFA from Canterbury University in 1988 and has maintained a strong exhibition presence throughout New Zealand since that time. He won the inaugural Wallace Art Award in 1992 and has completed Artist-in-Residency programmes at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2002), Southland Museum and Art Gallery (2005) and Tylee House, Sarjeant Art Gallery (2007). In 2010 Braunias won the Wallace/Fulbright Art Award and completed a residency at the Headlands Art Centre in San Francisco during 2011. His work has been curated in public gallery institutions including, A very Peculiar Practice, Wellington Art Gallery 1995 , Gruesome, Robert McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch 1998, Collectors Choice (ECNZ) , Te Papa Tongarewa, 2000, The Cartoon Show, Auckland Art Gallery (2001), Rats and Lemons (Big Wall Project) Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2004, Visual Bank, Tauranga Art Gallery 2007, Children’s Charter, Christchurch Art Gallery 2010, Old School, Ilam Campus Gallery, Canterbury University 2013 and The Archivists, Sarjeant Gallery 2014. Braunias’ work is held in the collections of Auckland University, Tauranga Art Gallery, Sarjeant Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongawea , Massey University, Christchurch Art Gallery, Canterbury University, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Southland Art Gallery and Museum. Internationally Braunias has exhibited his work in Sydney, Hong Kong, Manila, London, Prague and San Francisco.