Nice to meet you Eddie Clemens and Simon Lawrence
Having studied together in Christchurch over a decade ago, Eddie Clemens and Simon Lawrence have always perceived an affinity in their approaches to art making. They nevertheless take very different trajectories and always end up in very different places. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity for them to set their works on a collision path. Within the confines of the Blue Oyster spaces they will test out intersecting hypotheses and conduct pseudo-scientific experiments, in what may appear to be entirely parallel universes.
For this exhibition Clemens has developed new works which draw on the subtle and often inexplicable motifs that echo through his work. Clemens' use of simple processes to transform mundane objects and components into animated, idiosyncratic sculptures, will be familiar to those who saw his work while he was in Dunedin as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. Picking up a thread from his show Delusional Architecture (presented at the at Hocken Collections gallery at the culmination of his fellowship), Clemens' sculptures hone in on the suggestive potential and wit of simple artifice, yet retain their subtlety with seemingly incongruent references.
Hailing from Christchurch, Simon Lawrence creates installations using contraptions and videos that begin with odd instances of science fiction, supernatural activity and entirely fictitious occurrences. With new works tailored to the cavernous industrial spaces of the Blue Oyster, Lawrence's allusions roam with guile from the mythical history of the black swan to fault-filled mechanisms that behave in unexpected ways.
With their open-ended configurations Clemens and Lawrence provoke a search for connections and explanations that always rest unattainably out of reach.
