a gallery presents

”Post Dunedin Graffiti” revisits five former Dunedin graffiti artists to find out how their careers have evolved in recent years. The paths they have taken have diverged, but the remaining traces of their street styles provide a common thread to the exhibition.

The pseudonymous Shaded Skull’s career has led him to tattoo art, perhaps a natural extension of his strongly graphic drawing style. In contrast, Tom Mackie and Sean Duffell’s work has led to more gallery-based careers. Duffell provides an intriguing installation piece and a Black-on-black painting which harks back to his most notable graffiti creation. Mackie’s work mixes pre-Columbian artefacts with modern pop culture to comment on the immutable nature of art.

Nigel Roberts also looks to art history, with a strong work harking back to a golden age of sign-writing before the advent of modern digital technology. Jay Hutchinson completes the exhibition with an obsessively embroidered replica of a tagged road sign which raises the ”low art” of graffiti tagging to a higher level.

The exhibition’s title is deliberately ambiguous. These are the post-Dunedin works of former graffiti artists, but the lack of a hyphen suggests that it is also more than a slight hint of an instruction to street art’s next generation.

New New New Corporation and a gallery present

Post Dunedin Graffiti

An exhibition curated by agallerypresents.com for Eskdale Gallery. The exhibition includes work by five artists that were part of Dunedin’s graffiti scene between 2000 and 2010. This exhibition however does not focus on graffiti but instead explores the diverse direction that each artists practice has taken. What started on the streets of Dunedin through paste ups, tagging, stencils and throwies, has evolved into what you see today. Each individual has used their talent, passion and dedication to push their practice beyond the street.

The exhibition includes work by

Nigel Roberts, currently based in Auckland. Roberts is one of the earliest graffiti writers in Dunedin. Roberts started painting in the late 1990’s and is best known for his highly skilled large-scale graffiti pieces. His current practice explores typography through a series of complex processes that were used by sign writers before the digital age. Currently his work specialises in the use of gold leaf and reverse painted enamel on glass.

Sean Duffell, currently travels extensively and is based in Wellington. Duffell started painting his now iconic three eyed character in the late 1990’s, a character that still occasionally makes an appearance in his current works. He has made a name for himself as one of New Zealand’s top street artists, specialising in his unique abstract wall pieces that can be found all over the world. Several examples of his work can be found on buildings in and around Dunedin.

Tom Mackie, currently based in Wellington. Mackie’s paste ups first started appearing in Dunedin streets back in early 2005. His practice then evolved on to the walls of Wellington where he created large street pieces, from here his focus then naturally progressed to the gallery. Mackie is a project based artist, he uses museological methods of display as he drags our accepted notions of archive and history into a more unsettling territory.

Jay Hutchinson, currently based in Dunedin. Hutchinson started spray painting stencils on walls in 2002. Hutchinson is a project based artist, his practice explores concepts and ideas around labour, value and exchange. His current work explores the urban environment though hand-embroidered sections of the street, that he spends hundreds of hours slowly reproducing in thread.

Shaded Skull, currently based in Auckland. Shaded Skull started painting graffiti in 2003 and quickly became one of Dunedin’s most notorious bombers. From 2011 he started tattooing, specialising in his own versions of traditional flash that he spends hundreds of hours re-drawing and tattooing at Merv O’Connors Auckland Tattoo Studio, the longest running tattoo studio in New Zealand.

The exhibition opens at 5:00pm Friday the 24th of August and runs until the 10th of September 2018

Nigel Roberts, Sean Duffell, Shaded Skull and Jay Hutchinson will be in attendance.

Thanks to Murray Eskdale for letting a gallery put on this exhibition and to New New New Corporation for the support

two cups and a
Jimmy’s mince and cheese
pie wrapper
Jay Hutchinson

Saturday 21 April – Saturday 12 May
Opening Preview: Friday 20 April, 5:30pm

Looking to his immediate environment while following a psychogeographical model, Jay Hutchinson’s new exhibition, two cups and a Jimmy’s mince and cheese pie wrapper explores the familiar streets of Ōtepoti Dunedin, and in particular, the central industrial area of the Ōtakou Habour.

Through his long-standing interest in urban culture and his chosen medium of needle-work, as is seen in his 2006 exhibition, from textile to concrete at Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Hutchinson employs his immediate geography as a way of understanding it’s contexts and histories and the effect of such understandings on the individual.

Jay Hutchinson is a Ōtepoti Dunedin-based artist with a Masters of Fine Arts from the Dunedin School of Art (2008). He has exhibited through Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and China. Recent exhibitions include; Loosely based on a series of events that never actually happened including a conversation and an argument with my sister circa 1988, Eskdale Gallery (2018); Across from the court, on the way to the mall, The Dowse Art Museum (2017); Turn left at the end of the drive, Enjoy Public Art Gallery (2016).

Justin Spiers
Slow Inward Fall, 2017
Pigment Print,
$700