Art seen: March 20

... we all become all of these things [installation view] (2025), by Megan Brady.

(Blue Oyster Art Project Space )

Spaciously composed and engaged with multiple dimensions of the gallery is a body of work by Megan Brady (Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tūāhuriri, Pākehā) that navigates connections across time, place and the meaning of kupu or names.

In the centre of the space are three floor-to-ceiling ribbons of rimu. They are made up of small sections of floorboards, bound together with coloured bias binding and emblematic of kelp, lichen and bone. Brady’s choice of colour and materials make connections to the root meanings and associations of names. The word, rimu, for example, has connections with words for both seaweed and lichen.

Affixed by small cross-sections of rimu, and spanning sections of the upper wall to the ceiling, are a series of linen textile swatches. Depending on the time of day, they create shadow silhouettes on the walls. Characteristically, Brady works with removing sections of thread from the fabric to create unique geometric patterns. The subtle colour co-ordination is again emblematic, reflecting natural elements in green-, blue- and bone-coloured hues.

In a playful turn, one of the works, titled Support (connection) (2025), is a small stack of rimu with inlaid glass, upon which sits the gallery’s internet modem box. Two other works, in the form of rimu wedge doorstops, hold open the doors, marking the thresholds of the gallery.

Make Me Beautiful, Make Me Beautiful [no 6] (2025), by Amelia Eady.

(Slant Art Project Space)

"Make Me Beautiful, Make Me Beautiful", by Amelia Eady, is a visually compelling and confronting exhibition of 3-D-print filament sculptural works. Each piece is a fleshy pink coloured bodily conglomerate. And each one is a direct reflection of a generative AI process.

Eady begins with a self-portrait and then sends it to an AI generator with the prompt phrase "make me beautiful". The artist then conducts what appears to be an ongoing process of further prompts and retrievals. The end-products are 3-D-printed works that range from the wildly grotesque to the curiously monstrous.

The works are like glitched-out "ideal" beauty standards. We are seeing imbedded traces of what you can imagine are the images of "beautiful" bodies found generally on the internet, and those that have been used to inform the datasets that AI models are trained on.

Eady’s work is visually and inherently critical of AI. It also has a sense of humour and solid sense of design. Engaging with traditions of fine art, the smaller works have gilded frames and the larger sculptures sit atop white plinths.

Accompanying the exhibition are texts by Sarah McGaughran, Wesley John Fourie (and ChatGPT) and Nataan Brook. Amelia Eady was the recipient of the New Lands x Slant Summer Residency programme.

When a Secret Tastes Like a Lie (2025), by Victoria McIntosh. Photo: Forrester Gallery

(Forrester Gallery, Oamaru)

Connected with a suite of exhibitions at the Forrester Gallery co-ordinated by Caitlin Rose Donnelly (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Irakehu, Kāti Mako ki Wairewa, Pākehā), "Broken Narratives" is a poetic and reflective exhibition about the shared experiences of adoption with a critical lens on adoption practices.

Donnelly and Victoria McIntosh (Pākehā) present a diverse and harmonic mixed-media installation that includes a central moving-image work, embroidered textile objects and a mutual connection to jewellery practices.

Donnelly’s contribution is a series of three necklaces, alongside a video work that animates one of the necklaces. The materials include harakeke and toetoe, for example, and as objects conventionally worn on the body, they convey a sense of intimacy. For Donnelly, the work is about a deeply held connection to whenua and a meditation on feelings that coalesce around identity and heritage — about being Māori, being adopted and being a māmā, as the artist phrases it.

McIntosh’s poignant reflection on adoption spans over a decade of concern with the subject matter. My Invented History (2004), for example, is a vintage baby gown, embroidered with the artist’s own hair. When a Secret Tastes Like a Lie (2025) is a small chair papered in cut-out excerpts of Bible verses and paired with shoes that have inlaid pearls that belonged to McIntosh’s mother.

By Joanna Osborne