and now your'e gone.

Silo 6, Silo Park Sculptural Exchange over 3 Days

Childrens sand-pit, Crush Porcelain, Waiwhero, Brooms, Paper, Flowers, Sound.

Four year project exploring nurture and neglect as a mother while witnessing headlines of NZ child abuse cases.

I don’t know what I’m doing but I do know why.
Overflowing tea pots, scrubbing floors, crashing smashing epiphanies that is my zone. Sweeping, the Māori way, the white way, it’s all heated, defeated, trouble since the cot, have you seen my mana? I think I forgot. The most vulnerable are dying as we live in the past. Systems like blisters, shiny shoes, statistics rolling off the tongue, are we done? Maybe to buy, maybe to cry, maybe to sigh, maybe to lie,
I don’t know what I’m doing but I do know why.

Waka ā Hapori (Community Waka)

2020, Onehunga Bay Reserve, Auckland, NZ

Plywood, Recycled Milk Bottles.
2020 Whānui, Auckland Art Festival.
Outdoor Installation
Onehunga Bay Reserve, Auckland.

Waka ā Hapori (Community Waka) is a sculpture inspired by a waka tētē (fishing canoe). Waka tētē were historically used for the transportation of people and goods along the surrounding rivers of Tāmaki, due to its abundance in kaimoana and cultivation. In contrast to today, the fish scales bring awareness to the depletion of our kaimoana due to overfishing, heavy pollution and rubbish in our waters, especially plastic. Considering milk as a staple in New Zealand homes, using milk bottles as a material highlights dairy agriculture affects such as the degradation of clean air and water as well as plastic waste in our landfill. The workshops included creating 3,000 fish scales made from recycled milk bottles which adorn the waka.

Images 4-8 in gallery taken by Raymond Sagapolutele

majority rules.

2020, Gow Langsford Gallery

Domestic Brooms, approx 3 metres.

“But our experiences aren’t objects. They’re us, they’re what we’re made of. We are our situations, we are our moving through them. We are our participation – not some abstract entity that is somehow outside looking in at it all.” Brian Massumi, Politics of affect (Cambridge, U.K.: Wiley, 2015)

Bruno Latour, after Heidegger, worked to transform the semantic emphasis of ‘things’ from ‘matters of fact’ to what he describes as ‘matters of concern’. Working with objects and performance, Chantel’s practice discusses social, political and cultural concerns through her own subjectivity as a woman, mother, artist and Māori. “My work is interested in the self and society, examining my own position in the world by creating moments that encourage the viewer to ‘experience’ the heightened moments of today’s social issues, which may be otherwise invisible, to foster critical thought. The objects I make, are both ‘things’ and ‘matters of my concern’ which then invite the viewer to observe, engage, and perhaps impact the self and society in a different and positive way.”
- Artist statement, 2019

Review
John Hurrell – 27 February, 2020
http://eyecontactsite.com/2020/02/art-school-sampler

The Artist & The Undertaker.

2019, Auckland Art Gallery

Video, 2 x Mobile Phones

The Artist & The Undertaker is a 3 minute loop inspired by David Mealing’s public withdraw of his work at the Auckland Art gallery, Groundswell: Avant-Garde Auckland 1971–79.

Video Link below ( Intended listening with headphones)

The Encounter.

2019, Lake House Art Gallery
Auckland

Black & White Photograph
460mm x 410mm
Giclée Print

Inspired by Max Dupain, 1937, Sunbaker, The Encounter is an inquiry into an experience that seeks to produce a language beyond knowing.

"School didnt teach me shit from Clay” she said, age 61. “Huh, interesting” she said, age 39.

2019, Performance

A performative piece that discusses the gap between a generation that weren't able to have an education or felt not worthy enough to a generation that is seeking to bridge that gap and by doing so, healing in the process.

If Art was a Site/Sight.

2018, Performance
Baycorp, Auckland

Time: 9:00am, Duration: 12 mins

What it's like to masturbate in public.

2018, Video with edited Audio Slavoj Žižek

Moving image video is a discussion about manipulation today. Listening to ‘Zizek’ talk on academic institutes, colonisation, white man authority, corruption and so on and so on… I decide to take what I want from it, re-write it and to take his language and interpret it into my world while allowing audience an opportunity to make their own interpretations. Being Maori and Pakeha, brought up in western culture, there is always this unpacking of self. Currently studying within an academic institution I am aware that I am a minority and the teachings are not natural to my make up. In this sense I am being ‘produced’ within a foreign framework. This conforming of self to a certain degree so that I may ‘pass’ as a successful student while challenging, relies on my deeply knowing that my success comes from intuition, strong ancestry and an understanding that I am on equal pa with the world that surrounds me which is in contrast to western thought. On the other hand it is a reminder that I need to be here and my position and place is important as a minority. On a lighter note, I can find humor in what ‘Zizek’ is saying realising that we know what we know and confidence that western society has failed in what it set out to do purely because I am where I am and who I am today and with that confidence I can choose to stand or walk away or listen and learn and rise in that knowing. Finally, the title speaks to the idea of gesture, control and this attitude of male authority for personal pleasure which I feel Zizek encapsulates.
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Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj Žižek (1949-) is a contemporary Slovenian philosopher who is best known for his political theory and cultural criticism although he also made an important contribution to theoretical psychoanalysis and film theory.

Link to listen to Audio

Bystander of Tomorrow.

2016, Nathan Homestead, Manurewa, Auckland

A2 Digital Prints
Installation

Chantel Matthews (Perawiti) grew up in Glen Innes. There is currently a major overhaul of state housing and re-development taking place in this area. Streets have been demolished making way for a new modern multi-cultural community.

Exploring this ‘modern multi-cultural community’ Matthews-Perawiti likens it to the Maori Land March in 1975 where alienation, land, power and cultural shifts were central catalysts for protests. In this free for all land grab the gap between those that have and those that have not widens leaving this small suburb of locals watching as ‘politics’ moves in.

'Bystander of Tomorrow' talks about protest, the cultural shifts and the future generation where land or the idea of ‘home’ looks out of reach.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/87647744/chantel-matthewsperawiti-documents-changing-landscape-of-glen-innes

Chantel Matthews is a conceptual artist. Her practice can be described as sculptural moments that explore social, political, and cultural concerns through her own subjectivity as a woman, mother, artist, and wahine Māori. Through process-led exchanges, experience is located at the centre as story-telling mechanisms, contributing to objects in the making that become both ‘things’ and ‘things that matter.’

Works and resides in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

( Ngati Koata, Tainui Awhiro)

BVA from AUT, DIP Arts and Design from Whitecliffe College, Cert, Traditional and Contemporary Māori weaving from Unitec, Auckland.

At the Foot of the Maunga: Whanui Auckland Arts Festival 2020, Prelude:Gow Langsford 2020,AUT Head of School Award 2019, BC Collective Indigenous Award 2019,What's inside matters: Silo6 2019, The Artist and the Undertaker: Auckland Art Gallery 2019,Emergent:See Lake House Arts Gallery 2019, Bystander of Tomorrow: Nathan Homestead Manurewa 2016. Atamira Maori in the City: Shed 10, Auckland City 2013, Ferrari 2013, Muka: Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae 2012.

Media

Changing Landscape of Glen Innes

Works and resides in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

( Ngati Koata, Tainui Awhiro)

Media

Changing Landscape of Glen Innes

Review: EyeContact

Contact:

Works and resides in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

( Ngati Koata, Tainui Awhiro)

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Media

Changing Landscape of Glen Innes

Review: EyeContact

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Contact: chantel@waicreate.com

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Contact: