Exhibitions
Events
Join us for Slow Looking with Visual Music, an in-gallery Squiggla workshop where we make sense of the senses through hands-on free flow mark making. As Evan Woodruffe, artist and collector said ‘There are weapons in this world, but art is the antithesis of that. It’s something that builds up; it’s something that makes our hearts soar.’
In response to the works in the exhibition, workshop participants will be guided to engage with their senses and explore connections between music and mark making.
Using slow looking, Squiggla’s focus is on visual exploration, intuitive compositions and improvised ideas. The workshop will be accompanied by jazz music with drinks and refreshments provided.
This workshop is suitable for adults 18 years and over.
Bookings are essential and managed by the Gallery. Maximum of 20 places available.
You are warmly invited to view Evan’s exhibition Brain Colour, meet the artist, and hear him speak about his work.
Sunday 26 January
3pm Artist talk
Waiheke Community Art Gallery
2 Korora Road, Oneroa
The exhibition can be viewed at the Gallery, or online at https://www.paulnache.com/brain-colour
A catalogue of works can be viewed HERE
Brain-Colour 10 January – 9 February 2025
Evan Woodruffe’s new suite of works at Waiheke Art Gallery shimmer with light, as agile brush-marks dance over 2D and 3D surfaces. Their layers are porous; they are sprayed, drawn, painted, and collaged in a concert of saturated, pastel, translucent, and opaque hues. Colours are breathed into position, their vocabulary shifting from excited cries to hushed quiet, creating dynamic symphonies of colour, movement, emotion, and intellect. These are paintings of food, music, laughter, cocktails, and travel. “Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet”, wrote philosopher Merleau-Ponty.
In Evan’s paintings, the variations of colour and their varied application enable us to actively contemplate this slippage between our internal and external worlds. They seem to be happening both in our heads and outside; as things in and of themselves, objects with indistinct properties that affect us in obscure yet fascinating ways. These paintings are simply titled with the date of their completion, “their birthday”, explains Evan. “They are born from the flow of colour feeling, by applying my abilities until the work begins to separate from me. It develops away from being about any-thing, towards being some-thing: a painting with a life of its own”.
In the decade since Evan earned his MFA (1st Class) from Elam, University of Auckland, he has pursued his passion for colour as a sensation and a material, growing his visual vocabulary into a language that he applies to canvas, clothing, furniture, and even luxury cars.
His audience has spread, from nationwide out into the Asia-Pacific: Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing and Chengdu. Recent exhibitions include the 8th Beijing Biennale (2019), Hastings City Art Gallery (2023), and Sydney Contemporary (2024).
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