Past Exhibition

With their work Nature Morte Christchurch based artists Roger Boyce and Marie-Claire Brehaut draw a provocative equivalence between a bedroom methamphetamine lab and an artist's studio. It is a simile that expands beyond the formal mimicry of sprawling bottles and tubes, which characterise both set-ups; hinting at an overlapping alchemy of art, science and psychotropic substances. The artists describe their work as a tableau mort, referencing the stasis and opulence of Victorian tableau viviant, but with dead and deadly subject matter. The artifice of P-lab set-up is exposed through its mirroring on canvas as a peverse still life. In turn, the artists present us with a contemporary momento mori, which sparks our curiosity precisely because it reminds us of our mortality.

Presented alongside Joseph Worley Bewildering Scheme and Melissa Laing a small metal pin, a piece of rubber, a section of metal pipe with securing nut , exhibitions which spiral around our morbid fascination with death, depravity, disorientation, disaster, doubt, danger and destruction.