matilda fraser
14 november – 5 december
Garden Leave, a new exhibition by Toi Pōneke Art Centre’s visual artist-in-residence Matilda Fraser, examines the future of work and labour in an economic landscape impacted by pandemics, recessions, global trade, automation and excess.
Fraser questions “intelligent” ways of working which leave us ever more available to the pull of work around the clock, and considers how our time has been reimagined as less our own, but as 24 potentially billable hours. Garden Leave centres on research into the textile weaving industry as a key site of “disruption” and subsequent “maladjustment” period during the Industrial Revolution, with reference to the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Fraser explores the manual practice of weaving as contrasted with modern practices of production, and investigates aspirational office-culture aphorisms designed to encourage production.
View of Matilda’s studio during her residency at Toi Pōneke.
Matilda Fraser (BFA Hons, 2012, Massey University; MFA 2016, University of Auckland) is an artist and writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, with a multidisciplinary research-driven practice that deals with circulation, exchange, gifts, colloquial histories and the broken promises of language. More generally, her work draws on local histories to wonder about and investigate how they continue to affect us in the present.
Fraser’s work is installation-based involving film, sculpture, writing, layered vocal compositions, short-run publications, appropriating readymade objects, handmade fabrications of mass-produced objects, re-presenting archival materials, and interactive automatons.
Recent shows include His trunk for a hand, his foot for a scythe at RM Gallery, 2020; Poet No. 2 at The Booth, Gus Fisher Gallery, 2019; The Race Marches Forward on the Feet of Little Children, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2018; I digress, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, 2017; The Eight Hours Plan, Mason’s Screen, 2017; New Perspectives, Artspace, 2016. In 2015, Fraser undertook the Blue Oyster Summer Art Writing Residency, producing a series of nested texts entitled Against Efficiency, about the nature of attention economies.
