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Mimicry
June 3, 2023 @ 10:00 am – June 27, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
Mimicry
Dayle Palfreyman & Nicholas Males
3 – 27 June 2023
Mimicry presents new sculptural and photographic works by emerging artists Dayle Palfreyman and Nicholas Males. The artists share a conceptual interest in the experiential and social relationships that an encounter with particular objects, surfaces and sculptural arrangements can stimulate in an art environment.
Nicholas Males has developed a new interactive work responding to office life mundanities, and his frequent interactions within environments which we associate with both on a conscious and subconscious level. His installation, BAU – Business as Usual (2023), involves flatbed scanners with imagery scanned back and forth between screens. The viewer is witness to the real time degradation of visual data as it is processed, contrasted against the relative robustness of 90’s technology built to be repaired rather than replaced.
By working primarily with metal and beeswax, Dayle Palfreyman creates autonomous spaces that explore historical and thematic relationships between power and violence, desire and repulsion, and manipulation and temptation. New works created for Mimicry extend their previous work with addition of the figure; decaying bodily matter coalesces here with both solid and fluid formations. Palfreyman focuses on the reduction of flesh within a private space for this exhibition, conversing with individual and collective identity, and bio-relations.
Drawing on the viewer’s pre-existing associations with certain material qualities and subject matter, Palfreyman and Males play with affect and perception by inverting our typical expectations of objects and encounter.
Nicholas Males is an installation artist born and raised in Te Waiharakeke, now working and living in Tāmaki Makaurau. In February 2021, Nicholas completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts. Males’ installations merge the line between the domestic and corporate world, turning both upside down and creating familiar spaces that seemingly lack any real purpose. His practice is an ongoing observation and contemplation of the objects in the world around us, as well as his own attempts to extract meaning and understanding in this dynamic coexistence between object, dweller/viewer and space.
Males enjoys using seemingly outdated or defunct technology in his work, as often these found objects have built-in preconceptions relating to their function. Through recontextualisation, there is a sense of salvation created for these once purpose-built objects. The space and viewer form a different narrative with once mundane things through Males’ unusual combinations. Recent exhibitions include ‘You May Rest Here’ at Satchi&Satchi&Satchi (2022), ‘Downside Up’ at Studio One Toi Tū (2021) and ‘(In)corporate Party’ at MEANWHILE Gallery (2019).
Dayle Palfreyman is an artist born and based in Te Whanganui a Tara (Wellington), of Irish and English descent. Palfreyman’s practice focuses on sculpture and installation, where materiality is approached with a conceptual and embodied perspective. Through their process of making, Palfreyman interrogates their own relationship with materiality and organizes the work to allow audiences to do the same, within specific objects and materials that are relevant to their research.
Palfreyman’s aim is to understand the macro- and microcosms of power and violence, exploring these through the subjectivities of memory, as well as social and political, biological, and philosophical paradigms. Their recent work, exhibited in 2022 at the Wellington City Gallery’s ‘Tilia’ curated by Aaron Lister, includes two installations titled ‘To Walk Oneself’ and ‘Through Hand and Tongue.’ Palfreyman has also been exhibited at Enjoy Contemporary Artspace with a piece titled ‘Stoma’ (2022) using mild steel and silver. Palfreyman received their BFA (hons) from Massey University in 2020.
