You Should Be Into This

Imogen Kerr – Above Ground – Exhibition (Auckland). Opening Tuesday 6th October.

You should be into the fabulous Imogen Kerr, this talented, intelligent, humorous, not to mention beautiful 27 year-young practising artist and writer based in Auckland who amongst other accomplishments and honours has completed a BA/BFA at Elam and the University of Auckland 2002-2005 and she is a finalist (for the second time) in this year’s Trust Waikato National Art Award.

Imogen has shown at various galleries in Auckland, most recent of which has been City Art Rooms, Lorne Street, in conjunction with whom she was represented at the Bridge Art Fair in Berlin last year. Imogen also writes about art, having contributed to publications for Artspace, Webb’s Auction House, Cross St Studios and Ferner Galleries and for this reason I have rendered my fallible words extinct and instead have asked said beauty to tell us in her own humble language about her first solo exhibition. So read on and enjoy an honest insight into one of New Zealand’s most absorbing and exquisite creatives whom you should be in to…

“For my first independent solo exhibition, I am presenting Above Ground; a show of paintings that refer to aspects of individual mental and emotional survival within contemporary daily life. The works take as their compositions both the un-sensationalised, everyday subject matter of people – often my boyfriend Jacob, my friends or family – lying around, hiding under sheets, riding on boats and reading books, as well as sometimes referring to images from media such as grumpy, haggard or distracted-looking models from magazines and courageous, defiant or desperate people and animals from the internet. It is not always clear what the contexts of these portrayed situations are and compositional or technical features from throughout the history of painting seem to uncannily invade at times, but all works meditate on the notion of the individual, whose state of mind, whose response to being observed or whose encounter with something outside the frame, create an emotive intrigue. I see them as paintings that observe people (and sometimes animals) doing things, as opposed to being strictly portrait orientated. They are often in extreme close-up, sometimes oddly cropped or dramatically foreshortened, where the pervasive eye of the scrutinising camera is always present in the moment. And present too are the painterly impositions of this curious artist that display my thrill in both the act, and the formal possibilities, of painting.

The show’s title derives from the quote “every day above ground is a good day”, as Mel Bernstein (Harris Yulin) recites – and it proves to be something of a premonition of the pandemonium to come – to a drunken, strung out Tony Montana (Al Pacino) in the Babylon Club scene of Scarface (dir., Brian de Palma, 1983). My subject matter is, of course, not on the level of surreal-scaled, bloody drama that Scarface is, but for me the title implies the paradoxical mixture of the joy, vulnerability and ultimate tragedy that come with being alive and going about one’s life (as my sitters do in quite a different way), and simultaneously revels in the practice of painting as a daily and hopeful pursuit, that is involved with the placing of paint, quite literally, above a ground. A thing I very much like to do.”