Reuben Paterson, 'Everything Tells a Story', The Big Idea

The days of visiting galleries and exhibitions are temporarily on hold. The lost opportunity to get motivation from walking through new spaces and soaking in different works is a void The Big Idea wants to help fill. 

Our ‘House Visits’ series takes you into the homes and working spaces of people in the creative world, to see what they have collected on their travels, what it means to them and what they’re using as inspiration inside their own four walls.

Dina Jezdic - Auckland

The glitter dust screen print zebra titled Prayer was a wedding gift from a dear friend and artist Reuben Paterson. It is supposed to be paired with a jaguar titled Blessing to form an active/passive or asexual, or perhaps a co-dependent couple, where Prayer is the predator, and the zebra, its prey. They would look good in the bedroom together. 

It turns out that a group of zebras are called a dazzle (how fitting for a work of glitter!), and through exerting a barber pole optical illusion they cause pests and predators to mistake the zebra's movement direction and mistime their attack. The black and white lines appear as if the stripes are moving up or down vertically and just like love, the zebra coat stripe pattern is one of the oldest questions in evolutionary biology tracing right back to Darwin. 

 

“Art has that purpose of connecting us to our times and as human prey under viral attack, we are now in our own dazzles fighting off a predator. We are that dynamic within a predator/prey system, a new relationship between the multicellular organisms of us, and the cell biology of the novel Coronavirus.” – Reuben Paterson.

 

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April 29, 2020