Gus Fisher Gallery ends the year with a suite of solo presentations by emerging Tāmaki Makaurau based artists Christian Dimick, Dayle Palfreyman and Peter Simpson. Through painting, installation and film, each artist transforms the gallery’s three main spaces through considered and contrasting approaches.

Exploring aspects of tracing and revealing, Christian Dimick presents a series of paintings in the dome gallery. The works signal a new painterly direction in Dimick’s improvisatory practice. Calico is utilised by the artist for its ability to retain marks and imprints after layers of the paint are removed from the work, leaving the viewer with only fragments of a once panoptic picture. These works attempt to visualise the physical impossibility of retaining our dreams, memories and thoughts with clarity. Here, Dimick explores painting as an open ended and ongoing exchange; narratives are disrupted and thoughts are intercepted by the action of painting. A line, a dream, a layer—each are made visible through the treatment of surface, texture and space.

Dayle Palfreyman has worked collaboratively with artists Cello Forrester and Henrietta Fisher to produce a sound and moving image work. The installation is sited in Gallery 2 which formerly functioned as a women’s bathroom and changing room during the building’s broadcasting era. In the work Palfreyman reinterprets the Scottish folk myth of the Kelpie: a shape-changing aquatic creature that can appear on land as a horse. This area of Palfreyman’s practice draws our attention to bio-relations, seen here through the partnership between humans and our equine companions. Framed through a feminine lens, the film examines how myth shapes an understanding of desire, grief, and the elusive nature of ‘truth’.

Peter Simpson presents a new site-responsive installation which explores the material histories of objects and architecture. I am free because of an open-plan kitchen is an installation made of three components: the gallery space itself, two kauri doors sourced from a villa near Maungawhau (Mt Eden), and kōwhaiwhai painted on the kauri doors by the artist. Through their intertwinement, the components reflect the different types of status assigned to objects when subject to Coloniality. The room is an object of property comprised of a multitude of non-human objects that perform the labour that such a space requires. The two kauri doors have been liberated from similar roles and now carry out the labour that an artwork demands. The kōwhaiwhai activates a Māori perspective, allowing us to view these non-human objects as more than their prescribed object status allows.

Christian Dimick (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Christian Dimick is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, primarily working in the field of painting and drawing to explore ideas of memory, intimacy and sentimentality. Through their work in the studio, Dimick forms a distorted visual biography that exhausts the mediums of paint and canvas through reiterative processes of mark-making. Dimick’s “works are the result of a practice that is reflexive, reactive and adaptive, rather than authoritative or directorial. They invite the viewer to consider painting as a process or negotiation, something open-ended and ongoing…” – Andrew Clark

Dimick graduated with a BFA (First class Honours) from Massey University, Wellington, in 2022. Since then, he has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in both Aotearoa and Australia.

Peter Simpson (Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Tamaterā, and Pākehā, Aotearoa)

Peter Simpson (b. 1990) is a Māori artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He is of Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāti Tamaterā, Indian, Pākehā descent. He is currently a PhD candidate at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuro Massey University. He completed an MFA at the Slade School of Art, University College London in 2019, was a participant within the Maumaus ISP programme 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal, and completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London in 2013.

Recent exhibitions include from elsewhere, Te Uru, Tāmaki Makaurau (2024); He Rāwaho with George Watson, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau (2023); Literature’s Arrival to the Pacific, Blue Oyster Project Space, Ōtepoti (2021); Te mātauranga ō te Pākehā (The knowledge of the Pākehā), Mayfair Art Fair (2020); A retreat in time, Big Screen Southend, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2017).

Dayle Palfreyman (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Dayle Palfreyman is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Palfreyman graduated from Massey University in 2019 with a BFA (Hons). Working primarily with metal and beeswax as well as engaging in collaborative practices, Palfreyman’s work explores points of tension, with desire and manipulation being overarching themes. These themes are woven through a combination of theoretical perspectives, personal experience and historical contexts.

Recent exhibitions include I’m so into you at The Physics Room, Ōtautahi (2024), To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui a Tara (2023) and Tilia at City Gallery Wellington, Te Whanganui a Tara (2022).

Cello Forrester (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Cello Forrester is a musician and writer. They are in the Flying Nun band Womb, alongside their siblings, and will be releasing their third album, One Is Always Heading Somewhere, in early 2025. Their compositional works have featured at theatres including Bats, Circa, and Basement, as well as art galleries including The Physics Room, Blue Oyster, and play_station.

Henrietta Fisher (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Henrietta Fisher is an artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara working primarily with video installation and other image, object and time based media. Her work is concerned with contemporary psyche, libidinal resources and anthropocentrism. Informed by material exploration as metaphor, recurrent symbols and characters pertain to ideas of sensuality, dissolution and devolution, communion and surveillance. Fisher graduated from Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University in 2023 with a BFA (first class honours); she has an upcoming show at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Wellington in December.