MOTH @ Waikato Museum

MOTH was recently invited to present an aspect of our collections as part of the Intraspace project: interventions with Waikato Museum non-gallery space. Part of the ongoing Renovation collection this display presents reconstructions of abandoned rural out-buildings documented over the years by a number of anonymous individuals.

Derelict @ Toi Poneke

This exhibition titled You Say Tomato curated by Mary-Jane Duffy for Toi Poneke Gallery, Wellington on from the 5th - 26th March 2011 features works by Adi Brown, Caroline Earley, Gavin Hurley, Lauren Lysaght, Anna-Marie O'Brien, Mark Rayner, Paul Rayner, Sian Torrington and Kate Walker. Duffy describes the show as "a group of artists, working inside and outside the art world in ways both wild and cultivated, bring[ing] together connections where there were none before and bears singular fruit". 


As an extension of the Derelict installation at Masterworks Gallery in Auckland, MOTH has invited artist Karl Chitham to re-interpret the story of failed architect and potter, A. Verlassen for You Say Tomato. For the show he has created a series of limited edition posters.

Derelict @ Masterworks Gallery

For Thinkspace MOTH has invited artist Karl Chitham to re-create vessels from the little known collections of failed architect and potter A. Verlassen. According to a close friend and former business partner, Verlassen amassed an impressive collection of ceramic vessels created by architects from all over the world. Very few people were aware this collection existed and even fewer ever had the chance to see it before it was destroyed in the 1960’s. It has been suggested that the collection contained examples by some of the world’s most renowned architects but this has never been fully substantiated.

For Derelict, Chitham has used existing descriptions of works from the collection and placed them into an architectural framework. Through this collaboration MOTH hopes to provide a sense of the relationships Verlassen and the architects may have had with their pots.


A recent listing in Urbis Magazine featuring the Derelict exhibition. 

Le Corbusier, 2011, Courtesy of MOTH

Gummer, 2011, Courtesy of MOTH

Terrace Pa @ Lopdell House

Lady (Putiputi) Penelope Simcock was a collector of ephemera and items related to New Zealand Tourism, and in particular she was interested in representations of Maori for European audiences. Very little reference to Lady Putiputi (as she was known) remains. A small notebook discovered in 1987 contained a detailed inventory of her collections. Included in the listings were large collections of photographs, footage and artefacts from New Zealand tourism history, including rare plans for the development of a model Maori Pa to be constructed on thermal terraces. Also among her collections were a number of rare artefacts, Maori and European, which were made specifically for the tourist market and featured westernised representations of Maori imagery and subject matter. Unfortunately following the uncovering of the notebook it was also dicovered that Lady Putiputi’s descendant who had inherited the bulk of the collections had donated much of it to opportunity shops unaware of its intrinsic value as a snapshot of New Zealand cultural history. In later years the notebook was also lost. What has grown in its place is a mythology surrounding the content of the collection which may well have been one of the most valuable collections of its kind in the world.

 

 

Created as part of a residency hosted by the Rotorua Artist Residency Programme in 2010, MOTH re-interpreted aspects of Lady Putiputi's collections. A number of individual works were made for the residency including a model of Terrace Pa and a billboard advertising poster. The works were first exhibited in their entirety at Waiariki Institute of Technology and then later as part of the exhibition Where Are We at Lopdell House Gallery, Auckland curated by Kate Wells.  



Terrace Pa, 2010, Courtesy of MOTH



Soda Whare, 2010, Courtesy of MOTH

Trad. Paint Whare, 2010, Courtesy of MOTH

Sulphur Whare, 2010, Courtesy of MOTH

Recent Acquisitions @ Objectspace

The collection shown here is identified in the MOTH manifesto as ‘Recent Acquisitions’. This selection consists of objects that have been purchased, donated or bequested to MOTH in recent history. Unfortunately as with many inherited collections staff have been unable to authenticate the provenance of these particular artefacts. In order to adhere to our mission of ontological progress we have chosen, for the time being, to display narratives in the ‘house style’ based on the information deposited with the objects.

As a visitor to our collections, you may well recognise and be able to identify one or many of these artefacts beyond the limited interpretation provided, we do however ask that you keep this information to yourself as we have already initiated an internal framework of consideration.