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Please join us for the opening of Slow Jamz Till Midnight, a new exhibition by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist, Christina Pataialii. Presenting a suite of paintings, Pataialii uses codes to offer a language which destabilises traditional dominances within the field of abstraction in a humorous and playful manner.
Slow Jamz Till Midnight takes its cue from the late-night R&B radio show of Pataialii’s youth, where young lovers made shout-outs to one another to woo from a distance. The nostalgia and memory of the artist’s youth serve as a backdrop for contemplating/navigating the culturally complex spaces occupied (both then and now), considering ways pictorial space might contain (but not confine) these conversations. Taking-on the historical weight of her medium, Slow Jamz Till Midnight is an exploration of the artist’s own existence within that history, inserting one’s self into it and by doing so, disrupting it.
Christina Patailaii is an Auckland-based artist currently completing her MFA at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. Pataialii's paintings interrogate traditionally European male-dominated fields of abstraction, whilst injecting more subjective images that perform as codes. Coding, for Pataialii, offers a language formed under dominant structures that employs humour and slippage to evade and destabilise. Pataialii challenges conversations around contemporary painting through the use of her own Pacific body, and proposes new kinds of cultural and pictorial spaces. Recent exhibitions include The Tomorrow People, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, 2017; INFLUX, ST PAUL St, Auckland, 2016 and Pātaka Art + Museum, Wellington, 2017; Rematerialized, DEMO, Auckland, 2017; The Tie That Binds, Whitespace, Auckland, 2016.
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