Illegal Tender

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery is proud to feature Illegal Tender, a site-responsive installation by a group of Auckland-based street artists operating individually under various pseudonyms and collaboratively under the name Cut Collective.

Cut Collective formed in 2004, operating as a full-time studio since 2008, and has quickly established a significant profile and following, both in the public consciousness and media in New Zealand. They are recognised for producing a cacophony of elaborately stencilled graffiti work and will be spending just over a week in Dunedin from the 1st of October, working on the core components of their latest installation, Illegal Tender. The exhibition will coincide with the biennial Otago Festival of the Arts.

Illegal Tender marks the most substantial exhibit by the Collective in an art gallery and will include the largest mural, roughly 24 x 4 M, they have produced. This, combined with the other components of the exhibition, including a newspaper distributed throughout the galley space and sculptural elements, such as a false shop-front, will be both conceptually and physically confronting.

The group, whose work is informed by graphic design, and the social implications of such issues as consumerism, political corruption, and gentrification, seeks to communicate directly with their work, while simultaneously provoking various indirect interpretations and messages through the use of juxtaposition, and visual suggestion.

This milestone show in Cut Collective’s career touches on the role of money in contemporary society, wherein  government declares a tender to be “legal”, thereby endowing it with value. Cut Collective subverts this notion, by creating and distributing their own Illegal Tender. The exhibition calls attention to the modern consumer society, and the apparent comfort people derive from being part of it.

Much of the visual tension elicited by Illegal Tender lies in the counterintuitive prospect of bringing graffiti—and on such an overwhelming scale—into a public gallery space. This critique on the role of the art institution highlights one of this exhibit’s major implications—the blurred distinctions between “high” and “low” art, and graffiti’s increasing importance to the contemporary art world.

“We feel we have some of our best work in the pipeline for this exhibition”, the group has commented, “with a focus on truly harnessing the collective’s collaborative ability. We also have our most ambitious work in store for this show and will be painting the largest wall we have ever attempted, inside or out.” Illegal Tender will startle, delight, and overwhelm the viewer’s range of focus, and emotion.

www.cutcollective.co.nz

For further information about Cut Collective’s

Illegal Tender, please contact:

Tim Pollock

Marketing Manager, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

03 474 3243

Tim.Pollock@dcc.govt.nz

Cut Collective: Illegal Tender

9 October 2010— 23 January 2011

Dunedin Public Art Gallery