Peter Roche's new exhibition takes us into a seemingly fictional dystopian state. Despite the use of old technology and state grey steel suggesting the tools of an outmoded totaliterianism, the issues raised are highly topical. Interviews suggests broad-ranging ideas around the role of the state, propaganda, public/private boundaries, and very current concerns about surveillance of citizens. The contemporary digital is inescapable.
Having first come to attention in the late 1970s as a performance artist, Peter Roche's object works embody a performative aspect. Nothing is static, all is dynamic -- lightness and darkness, sound and silence, stage and screen.
'Interviews' brings together three works drawn and reconfigured from a practice spanning 30 years. First produced in the late 1970s and mid-1980s these works have been regenerated to provoke conversations with the world and with each other, which are both new and timeless.
In titling his exhibition 'Interviews', in the plural, Peter Roche is also opening up the myriad of possibilities inherent in the viewer's engagement with art and the making of meaning. What is the nature of this engagement? How do we interrogate for meaning?
After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Peter exhibited widely throughout the 1980s and 1990s -- with major exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and internationally in the 1st Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane and the 1st Korean Bienniale of Contemporary Art. He has recently re-emerged with significant new bodies of work. In 2011 a major large-scale neon light work Saddleblaze was installed at the Gibbs Farm sculpture park on the Kaipara Harbour. His work is held in many public and private collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery, the Chartwell, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery amongst others.
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