Artist

  • Ed Ritchie and Megan Brady
enjoy.org.nz

Lay in measures is a new exhibition by Ōtepoti Dunedin-based artists Ed Ritchie and Megan Brady. The exhibition considers how architectural composition unconsciously affects bodily experience, through small-scale interventions of sound, subtle sculptural installations and replicated furnishings.

Acting as artist-anthropologists, Ritchie and Brady use the gallery’s entryway and the less visible sites of marking and repair throughout the leased building (from missing bricks and the height of doorway frames, to the patterned ridges of keyholes) to reinvigorate what may first slip from attention. The artists take notice of both forgotten and reinserted markings, offering loving attention to the ways that traces left by people affect the present in tiny and detailed ways.

Taking stock of Enjoy’s 2019 relocation to 211 Left Bank Arcade from its past life up the stairs at 147 Cuba St, Brady and Ritchie investigate the gallery’s relationship to its local surroundings, as well as the audience’s relationship to the new gallery. Their experience starts from the doorway, where artworks ask how design forms intuitive experience by examining how a body might enter and exit through space. The exhibition includes an original score by Megan Brady, which welcomes viewers into a world of subtle affectations. Similarly, the artists explore the reassuringly quiet security systems designed to keep people out as much as protect what lies within.

Usually, gallery staff will scrub away evidence of previous shows between exhibitions, offering a completely clean, blank slate. In Lay in measures, the artists choose to celebrate the failure of total erasure and remain in play with past tenants, considering dust an often-ignored inheritance.

Opening Hours

  • Wednesday – Friday, 11am – 6pm
  • Saturday, 11am – 4pm

Address

  • 211 Left Bank
  • Te Aro
  • Pōneke Wellington