Old Energies
Josephine Cachemaille and Alan Ibell
13 March - 28 April 2019
Ground floor galleries, Pah Homestead
Opening Night - 12 March at 6pm
Old Energies draws on the creative input of two contemporary artists, Josephine Cachemaille and Alan Ibell, who have produced new work inspired by the Wallace Arts Trust Collection and the Pah Homestead. Both artists playfully cast themselves in the roles of analyst or medium, tasked with exposing and channelling the relationships between the collection works, the historic building and their own art works.
Cachemaille and Ibell show that different responses to the collection and building result from a unique vision and practice. Cachemaille's sculptures employ a wide range of media including actual artworks selected from the collection. Her resulting exhibition is a large-scale assemblage, flattening the hierarchies between art and non-art objects; tweaking the perceptions of viewers as they are forced to negotiate often familiar artworks in surprising configurations and relationships. Ibell's contribution reflects a personal response to the collection through a series of paintings that examines this connection, be it formal, mythic, emotional or psychological
Old Energies will have wide general appeal for viewers of all backgrounds. The commissioned artworks will gather much interest as being entirely new, never seen before. Those with more traditional tastes shall appreciate viewing major New Zealand artworks selected from the 9,000 strong Wallace Arts Trust collection at the 1877 homestead in an entirely new light; the inspiration for two contemporary artists to produce exciting new work.
Featuring Josephine Cachemaille and Alan Ibell with a selection of artworks from the Wallace Arts Trust Collection. Curated by Nicholas Butler, Curator and Collections Manager Wallace Arts Trust.
Presented in association with Auckland Arts Festival 2019.
Image Credits:
Left is Alan Ibell, New Figure Reflecting, 2018 Acrylic on canvas, 475 x 375mm, Courtesy the artist and Sanderson Contemporary Art. Right is Josephine Cachemaille, Detail from Us, Us, Us (The Suter Art Gallery, 2017. Photograph: John Paul Pochin)
Biographies
Josephine Cachemaille is an award-winning artist who makes installations, paintings and sculptures. She has had multiple solo and public exhibitions exploring her relationship with non-human materials and objects. She has degrees in Psychology and Fine Art, and a post-graduate diploma in Art and Design. Josephine grew up in Nelson and now lives there with her husband, writer Grant Smithies, and their daughter Rosa.
I approach art-making as a place to engage with non-human things as bodies with needs, desires and agency. For me, objects, materials and media are collaborators who have the capacity to act, to know things, and to disclose these to anything that they are in relation to. In this sense, I am exploring the potential of art-making as kind of relational ontology, as a pathway to a place of re-enchantment with the non-human world.
Alan Ibell is a painter based in New Zealand (b. Christchurch). He studied Painting at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin, New Zealand. Alan spent several years in Melbourne before returning to New Zealand in 2016. He is currently based in Auckland, NZ.
Ibell is interested in painting as narrative and uses figuration as a way to convey a poetic or abstract visual experience. To this end he casts imagery from dreams, memories, personal anxieties and existential musings into the works to create absurd human narratives about transition and the search for fulfillment, be it spiritual or other. The painting takes on the form of an object upon which to meditate, a space for contemplation.