Earth Matters

Earth Matters includes work by artists who make reference to themes of global and environmental concern. It explores how we report on the world, and respond to our environment - either its physical matter or image proxy - with available technologies.

The artists in Earth Matters work in a variety of media from photography, to painting and sound-installation. They create images of our activity on earth, whether through the appropriation of news headlines, Google Earth's live imaging, or playing with pop-culture depictions of the globe.

Drawing on work from the contemporary collections of the Auckland Art Gallery, Earth Matters spans the last thirty years of art practice. The earliest work in the exhibition is a magnetic puzzle by regarded Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström titled Section of a World Map from 1973, and more recently, from 2006, is an installation by New Zealand collective et al. titledMaintenance of Social Solidarity.

This eclectic array of work reveals how contemporary art typically responds to the world by depicting either sites of immediate locality (its soil and earth); sites of exchange, or a total picture of the globe, often with the comic realisation of the ineptitude of form to reveal the totality of our experience of earth.