Megan Dunn: The Mermaid Chronicles 
with works by Andrew Brusso, Olivia Erlanger, Julia Holden, Alexis Hunter, Suzanne Husky, Brett Stanley, Lena Maria Thüring, and featuring Annette Kellerman, MeduSirena, Hannah Mermaid, Merman Jax, and Julie Atlas Muz  
21 October – 18 December 2022  

Brett Stanley, Hannah in the Kelp, 2020, colour digital print, courtesy of the artist  

The Mermaid Chronicles explores writer Megan Dunn’s longstanding fascination for mermaids and the world of professional mermaiding. Titled after a long prose poem Dunn wrote in the 1990s, the exhibition is a first for Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery as a mode of autobiographical curating on a topic that showcases the professional mermaid and tracks this mythical figure through high and popular culture. Dunn brings together vintage artefacts with painting, sculpture, underwater photographs, and videos by artists and professional photographers, and features several high-profile mermaid performers. She tells stories, explains art works, and quotes from the mermaid community in wall texts, a sound work and a PowerPoint presentation.  Recognising the mermaid as a mythological figure that continues to capture our imaginations, she also acknowledges the ways that mermaids serve society as creatures who bridge land and sea, human and non-human, fantasy and reality.  Owning up to her own preoccupations, Dunn asks us all to take mermaids seriously.  

Megan Dunn is the author of Tinderbox and Things I Learned at Art School, and a reformed video artist. In the late 1990s, she ran Fiat Lux, an artist-run space in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her art reviews and criticism have been widely published, as have her essays and stories. She is the 2022 Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters, where she is working on her memoir about motherhood, menopause and mermaids. Lots of mermaids. 

Lifting the lid on the lives of real life mermaids on RNZ.

The Mermaid Chronicles media release

Lucien Rizos: Everything
Curated by Robert Leonard  
21 October – 18 December 2022

Lucien Rizos, Everything, 2020-22, 66 magazines in three slip cases, courtesy of the artist

Everything is a project by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Lucien Rizos. Over three years he has documented the possessions of his uncle, Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017), Labour Party MP for Island Bay (1969–78) and local businessman. Rizos has organised his documentation into more than 60 magazines that canvass everything O’Brien kept relating to his public and private life. He has also made detailed composite photographs of his uncle’s bookshelves as an extended portrait of someone he was close to and deeply admired. This exhibition brings Rizos’s large-scale photographs, magazines and scanned imagery together with actual artefacts from O’Brien’s archive. It focuses in particular on Rizos’s most startling find.  This is his uncle’s secret art project worked on from childhood well into his adult life that invented a parallel world with an alternate geography, nation states, public figures and histories. The exhibition presents invented maps, lists, newspapers and hand-written histories as well as hundreds of his cut-out and hand-painted figures that represent named personages holding public office in his imagined world. Working with curator Robert Leonard, Rizos both offers up his uncle’s secret life to its first public scrutiny and tests the capacity of his medium to effectively tell O’Brien’s story. There is much to learn from the obsessions of both men, which Robert Leonard touches on in his account of this intriguing project.  

Lucien Rizos is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist who describes himself as operating on the fringes of the art world since the late 1970s. Former violinist with the NZSO, Rizos has been exhibiting his photographs and films for over 25 years. Notable exhibitions include: A Man of His Time, Photospace Gallery, Wellington, 2020; Marble Art Ltd., Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland, 2017;  Reverberation, City Gallery Wellington, 2014; History in the Taking, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 2014; Cinema & Painting.  GDBY PK P. Screening. Adam Art Gallery, in conjunction with Circuit Artist Film and Video Aotearoa. Curated by Michelle Menzies and Mark Williams, 2013; Where I Find Myself, Work 1974-2005. Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, Wellington, 2005; and Lest We Forget: Photography, Memory and National Character, Wellington City Art Gallery, 1994.  

Robert Leonard is a curator and writer. He has held curatorial posts at National Art Gallery, Wellington; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Auckland Art Gallery, and City Gallery Wellington, and has directed Auckland’s Artspace and Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. His shows include: Zac Langdon Pole: Containing Multitudes, City Gallery Wellington, 2020; Colin McCahon: On Going Out with the Tide, City Gallery Wellington, 2017; Julian Dashper & Friends, City Gallery Wellington, 2015; Yvonne Todd: Creamy Psychology, City Gallery Wellington, 2014; Mixed-Up Childhood, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, 2005; Action Replay: Post-Object Art, Artspace, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland and New Plymouth, 1998; Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1992; and others. Leonard has also curated New Zealand artists’ representation at Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999, the Sao Paulo Bienal in 2002, and the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2015. He is co-publisher of the imprint Bouncy Castle and editor of Art News New Zealand. 

‘Secret life of Gerald: the New Zealand MP who spent a lifetime crafting a vast imaginary world’, Eva Corlett, The Guardian 

‘Lucien Rizos: the remarkable legacy of MP Gerald O’Brien’, RNZ

View the public programme associated with these exhibitions here.