Wabi-Sabi of the Sleeping Beauties

In this completely new body of work the artist Daniel Kirsch offers a surprising, gentle, and completely unusual new way to look at abandoned automobiles from around the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula.

The artist recycles and transforms parts of the old rusty vehicles giving them new life. He manually screen prints photographic images of the wrecks together with words and other relevant elements directly onto the rusty metal from each individual car that is shown.

This work's approach has a lot in common with Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese aesthetic and world-view valuing transience and impernanence. These qualities are generally lacking in our own western design aesthetic.

Kirsch's perspective offers some of the richness available in these qualities. His work re-introduces them to our increasingly homogenised western environments, and touches on our spiritual aspect of being human.

This show is the debut showing of Wabi-Sabi of the Sleeping Beauties. It combines screen prints on car body parts, screen prints on paper, photographs and a sound installation.

This exhibition also features a sound installation by audio engineer Nalan Kirsch, which blends a variety of mostly natural bush sounds, displaced  into a highly controlled, man-made environment like this gallery and offering an interesting reverse parallel to the out-of-context vehicles in their natural settings.