(From) Side to Side is an exhibition that explores the intriguing nature of shared experience. By using painting and drawing as a tool, Ruby Moana Thorley Wilkinson and Christian Dimick explore how the recollection of a certain time and place can differ drastically between individual perspectives.
Working alongside each other, information is gradually and unconsciously collected in the form of osmosis. In an attempt to disrupt the traditional languages and ideas within painting, that often seem to stem from the individual, the two artists have made a transaction, handing over their personal recollections of different shared experiences, in order to stimulate the creation of new works.
Alongside their exhibition with MEANWHILE, Ruby and Christian have created a publication, ‘(From) Side to Side’, which will be available to visitors at the gallery. The process of creating this publication required Ruby and Christian to interview three different pairs of people. Here, the pairs were asked to agree on a moment, time or place they have occupied together, and share their separate interpretations of this memory. In undertaking this process, Ruby and Christian set out to explore the notion of individual recollection within shared memory, and ultimately create work with that in mind.
About the artists:
Ruby Moana Thornley Wilkinson is a female artist operating in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Ruby utilises painting as a means of processing concepts revolving around the themes of memory and life experience. Ruby suggests that people can’t engage with a present experience without unconsciously recruiting our past knowledge to dictate the foundations of our thoughts. This corresponds with the style of painting Ruby chooses to engage with herself. The paintings are born in a gestural and alacritous manner. Working intuitively, Ruby recognizes the act recollection itself derives the marks she makes on canvas. By creating in a gestural way, viewers are able to experience new energies. Through these works, both sensations of embodiment and personal associations with form are reconsidered.
Christian Dimick is a multidisciplinary artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with a steady focus on both painting and sound. With reflexive impulses informing his painting process and current interest in memory and time, there is an overlap between present and past within current works, using the act of painting as a means of remembering. The constant transitioning between the present and past and the use of the body to mark this transition is what continues his aspirations within painting, along with the possibility of mutual understandings with the viewer.
