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Presented alongside Not standing still, a group exhibition curated by 2018 Blue Oyster and Caselberg Trust Summer Resident, Raewyn Martyn. This exhibition and accompanying publication features works by Katie Breckon, Dana Carter, Scott Flanagan, Jenny Gillam, Hope Ginsburg, Eugene Hansen, Motoko Kikkawa, Geoff Martyn, Melissa Martyn, Raewyn Martyn, William Henry Meung, Murdabike, Anet Neutze, Aroha Novak, Maria O’Toole, Charlotte Parallel, Kim Pieters, Deano Shirriffs and Jemma Woolmore, and writing by Gregory Kan, Rachel O'Neill and Raewyn Martyn.

Created alongside the solo exhibition In The Flesh by Natasha Matila-Smith, You Can't Promenade Alone features new writing by JM Francis, Natasha Matila-Smith, Talia Smith, Tayi Tibble and Faith Wilson.

Limited print edition available by email request.

Natasha Matila-Smith (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine) is an artist and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated from the University of Auckland with an MFA 2014. Natasha's practice interrogates ideas of singularity and rejects fixed identities. She often approaches heavy themes with satire, with her recent works dealing with social anxieties through combining contemporary culture with the digital landscape. Recent exhibitions include In The Flesh, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2017, The Cold Islanders, Waikato Museum, 2017 and you're my number 1, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2017. As a writer, she has contributed to numerous online and print publications which include Runway Australian Experimental Art, Matters Aotearoa, and Art New Zealand.

Prophecy; a reflection on the oracle is the accompanying text to Samuel Jackson's exhibition Big Sacred Technologies.

Big Sacred Technologies reinterprets the ritual practices of divination and its idiosyncratic nature. The relationship between it and with ‘the other’ finds new potential in symbols, recast as hieroglyphs, codes or secrets—an ambiguous understanding of things to come. The future is a contestable field; big data, and more broadly the financial sector and state, now assimilate itself as a labyrinth-like grid of control, short circuiting chance and possibility, leaving nothing but the inevitable merging of capital with what is to come.

Samuel Jackson is a Wellington based writer and artist with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Media Studies from Victoria University (2015). 

2016 Summer Writing Resident Robyn Maree Pickens spent four weeks on Quarantine Island/Kamau Taurua developing Sunshine sacrifices.

A hybrid text, Sunshine sacrifices is a product of the island experience and the experimental platform offered by Blue Oyster. Juxtapositions between image and text are designed to deepen connections and produce slippages on ecological themes, and between related historical and contemporary socio-political events.

Robyn Maree Pickens is a writer and poet, based in Dunedin, currently undertaking her practice-based Ph.D in the field of digital poetry at the University of Otago.

Online publication documenting the Uniform 'Exchange' exhibitions at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery and Blue Oyster Art Project Space and the associated !No Venues! events that took place in May 2016.

Uniform is sound, art, film, and writing by underground women, for everyone.
Read more about their May exhibition at Blue Oyster here.

The Brook Project celebrates the socio-cultural history of Carisbrook and its surrounding neighbourhood and encourages new dialogues about the potential of disused public space and the process of making informed, conscious and relevant public art projects. Click here to purchase limited edition hard copy.

Previously based in Dunedin, Kerry Ann Lee is an artist, designer and writer living in Wellington. Aroha Novak is based in Dunedin and has been exhibiting her work since 2008. Ella Sutherland is a graphic designer based in Sydney, Australia.

Published December 2015
Designed by Son La Pham

Written in response to a caravan residency Philip carried out in central Christchurch in February 2015, The Presence of Absence is an experimental narrative: a pick-a-path gothic sci-fi nightmare masquerading as psychogeographic hypertext. 

Brendan Jon Philip is a Dunedin based artist, writer and musician. Son La Pham is a graphic designer and artist based in Auckland.

Published June 2015
In conjunction with the New Zealand Young Writers Festival

Llyr takes form as a collaborative exercise between Dunedin based painter Ella Knapton and Port Chalmers based poet Hera Lindsay Bird, moving between poetic erasures and painterly drawings in an online format.

Ella Knapton graduated from the Dunedin School of Art in 2014. Hera Lindsay Bird holds an MA in poetry from Victoria University.

Motivated to support and promote diverse perspectives and healthy debate around arts culture in New Zealand, this suite of texts is a result of a new collaboration between the Blue Oyster Art Project Space and The Lumière Reader.

Both organisations recognised a shared opportunity to foster creative and critically engaged writing practices by developing an extended text within the field of contemporary art criticism. Summer Residency recipient Matilda Fraser proposed to examine the value-exchange systems surrounding present modes of critique. Read more about the residency here.