Love in the Time 2020
Love in the Time 2020
Teresa HR Lane
Sanderson Contemporary
Osborne Lane, 2 Kent Street, Newmarket, Auckland
15 July - 09 August 2020
Opening event: Saturday 18 July 11am - 1pm
Teresa HR Lane, Art, 2020, mixed media collage , 250mm x 250mm
Auckland based artist Teresa HR Lane aspires to present visual equality by disrupting the male gaze with an irreverent humour. Inspired by abundant information, disconnected Greek ancestry, influential but contradictory myths, bodily representation, and the never ending story of (in)equality. Lane confounds our expectations by dismembering and reassembling with an intricate mixed media collage practice, ‘painting with paper’, and ‘drawing with scissors’, offering the viewer an alternative vision, interwoven with an ethereal place, imagined but firmly entrenched in reality. At time’s confronting, these collages document the ordinary and celebrate the extraordinary, accentuating the perversity of human interaction.
Lane received an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 2017. Recent exhibitions include Oh My, God, Sanderson Gallery, Auckland; I’ve Hidden Your Knickers Under Here (where the boys won’t see),Allpress Studio, Auckland; Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards, Whakatāne Exhibition Centre; Nevermind the Apocalypse, Paul Nache Gallery, Gisborne. Lane was the recipient of Akel Schulte Runner-up Award in the 2019 Molly Morpeth Canaday Painting and Drawing Award and is a finalist in the 2019 National Contemporary Art Award and the Wallace Art Awards in 2017. Lane’s works are included in the Wallace Arts Trust Collection and various private collections.
Essay by Evan Woodruffe:
Imagine you could rearrange the world. All the stories that come flooding through our screens and across our coffee tables, telling us what the world looks like – you could reconstruct them; take all the images that propose to show us who, where, and what we are, and create a new, more familiar mythology.
In 2019, there were 3 billion images being uploaded to the internet every day, and each day 2.5 billion of these are stolen. But while many artists mine this treasure trove for source material, Teresa Lane insists on finding hers through a physical search of bookstores, thrift shops, and donated texts. For her, pouring over books and magazines with a magpie eye for images that intrigue, also provides her with their history. Her selection is not from a shallow Google Search, but pulled from its source article with its full context realised. Her image search is research.
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."
Teresa is frank on revealing her sources; where she has purloined these images from, making careful selection, hand-cutting with tiny scissors and scalpel, sorting into boxes labelled “eyes”, “cocks”, “flowers”, etc., which she then reassembles into fantastical stories. Stories so far-fetched that it’s proper to ask: where did you get your information from? How are we supposed to untangle the knotted clusters of snipped limbs, flower heads, and animal parts that float across blue skies, images that are so full of information, of desire and humour that we clearly need to believe in these fresh new worlds?