Crossings
(a group show about intimacies and distances)

Turumeke Harrington
Yolunda Hickman
Sonya Lacey
Rozana Lee
Grant Lingard
Vivian Lynn
Allan McDonald
Emma McIntyre
Next Spring
Layla Rudneva-Mackay
Richard Shepherd
James Tapsell-Kururangi

…caesuras serve as techniques for modifying subjectivity, activating a process that disrupts perception and feeling and can ultimately generate a transformation, a new way of becoming.

Paul Preciado, Artforum, 2020

A collective pause, a moment to turn inwards – Crossings began with a reflection on the disruptions of 2020. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings was a group show sparked by these intimacies and distances. It brought together a range of artists and works that registered the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. But it was not a show about the pandemic. The artists selected worked in a variety of media, were of different generations, had different life experiences and cultural backgrounds. Few of the works were made during or about lockdown. Instead, the show explored how objects, images, and materials carry meanings that are opaque, at the edge of conscious thought, that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggled at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

The works in the exhibition included meditations on public and private spaces and our movements between them; on the body in states of illness, pain, pleasure, reproduction and death; on mobility and change in the face of political and economic turmoil, and on the inevitable impact of an unseen threat that has changed everything. They asked: how can these intimate experiences, fraught relationships, larger forces and their attendant effects be communicated in an art work?

Crossings included moving image work from current Walters Prize finalist Sonya Lacey and the first New Zealand screening of Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger’s filmwork, Havarie, 2016; installations by Next Spring, Grant Lingard, Turumeke Harrington, Yolunda Hickman and Rozana Lee; an artist book by Vivian Lynn; paintings by Emma McIntyre and Layla Rudneva-Mackay; photographic series by Allan McDonald and Richard Shepherd.

Again, Grandmother, Grey Street, 2019-2021, an illustrated text by James Tapsell Kururangi can be accessed here (contains graphic content). This is the artist’s contribution to Crossings, and it was on his request that this is only accessible as a PDF via the Gallery’s website.

Crossings was generously supported by the Chartwell Trust.

All images courtesy of the Adam Art Gallery