Ambitious & Diverse

Sympathetic Resonance

The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson 19 October 2019–9 February 2020, curated by Sarah McClintock

Sympathetic Resonance a group the eighth in a series of contemporary art projects at The Suter Art Gallery in Nelson since 1999. Designed by curator Sarah McClintock to ‘deconstruct the hierarchies which tether art to people, material, place and time’, Sympathetic Resonance includes a collection of works that reject labels often applied to artistic practices like that of being a painter or sculptor and Western cultural binaries like artist and audience, male and female, individual and collective, form and function, landscape and portrait, past and future, mass culture and high culture and so on. The metaphor of two tuning forks is used to articulate how the individual artworks relate to each other, and in the exhibition catalogue this is explained further:

‘These two objects are attuned to each other and the manipulation of one affects the other without physical intervention. Their connection is unseen but visceral . . . their (as a key theme of much contemporary art) might have been explained further to provide a clearer context for understanding the show as a whole.