Be Tender

Be Tender
By Reuben Paterson

Exhibiting from Monday 17 October to Friday 25 November 2011

Be Tender
This interactive exhibition Be Tender invites audiences to lose themselves into Paterson’s personally colourful kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope has always required interaction, a dialogue between hand and eye, and of inside and outside, sending shards of coloured glass and fields of light into endlessly fleeting configurations.

Be Tender transforms the kaleidoscope into a new type of technological and physical interaction – where gentle and considerate hand and body gestures dictate the directional movement of Paterson’s glitter painted imagery. 

Be Tender is an evolution of an interactive work developed for Gazillion Swirl, Te Mahi Toi o Reuben Paterson, an exhibition in the Todd Foundation Learning Centre, Auckland Art Gallery, September 2011 - September 2012.

Reuben PATERSON
Born in Auckland in 1973, Reuben Paterson has received numerous awards and residencies, and exhibits both nationally and internationally. Paterson evolves traditional Maori motif and fabric pattern using non-traditional media that are organic and fluid in nature and adept as memory cues variously drawn from wallpaper, Hawaiian shirts, Dad’s ties and my kuia’s party dresses.

“The kaleidoscope never allows the eye to rest and, consequently, independent genealogies merge and fade producing memory cues through patterns of diverse origin. From kuia’s party dresses, his father’s ties, Hawaiian shirts, wallpaper and sheets, to M?ori emblems that materialise from disparate designs Paterson animates his past and constructs his present”.
Broker, David: Kaleidoscope Culture,Contemporary Visual Art and Culture Broadsheet Australia. Vol 38.4, pp. 274 – 276.

EVENTS AROUND THE EXHIBITION

Vitamin S live
Vitamin S is an Auckland improvised music and performance collective. They will create a live improvisation in front of the Be Tender exhibition. Come and experience their interpretation of Reuben Paterson’s work. 
Saturday 22 October / 2 pm / Owens Foyer, Aotea Centre, THE EDGE / free.
This event is in conjunction with Art Week