Opening 6 – 8pm Tuesday the 3rd of July, 2012
Exhibition runs from 4th – 28th of July, 2012
Installation by Antoinette Ratcliffe
“Black and violet tree’s grasp with their twiggy fingers for the living, elongated shadows threaten to trip you and make fault lines. You were driving in your car and the music was up loud and something unexpected happened like that bit when those trees came alive and grabbed that guy and all that blood on the road wasn’t you. There is silence from the taxidermied ones who are kept safe in the pods, the zombie bunnies and squirrels steal a moment with the blood on the ground, and the ones watching are keeping your secret…”
Antoinette’s installations have been described as ‘being like a graphic novel we’ve all read at some point in our lives, but can’t quite find that copy of it just at the moment. Yet it is there, just under the surface like the story we’re all actually characters in.’ Antoinette’s work explores thematic narrative derived from contemporary animation, comedy, hybridity, horror conventions, banal situations and anthropomorphic association.
Antoinette completed her MA at The School of Media Arts in 2011 where she created an installation based project that has become ‘The Sick Bay’.
This year, Antoinette has shown in ‘Call and Response’ at the Sculpture Park in the Waitakaruru Arboretum in Tauwhare, and in the ‘Welcome’ group show at Satellite gallery. Her work has also previously been shown at the Waikato Museum of Art and History, in Auckland and Hamilton Fringe festivals, at Ramp Gallery, and she has had numerous solo and group shows in artist run spaces in New Zealand. Photographs of Antoinette’s work are posted regularly on her website, www.the-sick-bay.com.