Danie Mellor: Pleasure and Vexation

Danie Mellor: Pleasure and Vexation. The strata and spectacle of history

Pātaka Art+Museum

Aotearoa New Zealand

27 May – 19 August 2018

The first major exhibition of works by this award-winning contemporary Australian artist to be shown in New Zealand. Curated by Pātaka Art + Museum Director Reuben Friend, the exhibition will feature over 20 outstanding works, many large in scale, including some loaned from Australian museum and gallery collections.

A monumental mixed-media work on paper from 2010 entitled Fruits of labour provides the starting point for this selection of technically-astonishing drawings, paintings and digitally-manipulated photography, through which Mellor explores indigenous and Australian histories.

The presence of Indigenous Australians in his work draws attention to the catastrophic and tragic historical implications of colonialism, including the removal of indigenous people from their traditional Country.

Mellor, with both indigenous and non-indigenous heritage, stresses the significance of both Indigenous Australians and colonial histories, the need to talk about their interaction, and the issues that arise from those two things being parallel.