Courtesy: the artist and Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland.

Sanderson Contemporary Art presents A Temporary Observer, featuring a new body of work by Llenyd Price.

A Temporary Observer is a nod to the ephemeral nature of experience. For Price, painting serves as a way of processing experiences, thoughts, and anxieties through the lens of memory.

Memory can be viewed as a faculty of the mind, which stores our perceptions of the present moment. But, by their very nature, memories are subjective and inconsistent. When recounting moments, places and experiences, we become the unreliable narrator of our own lives; each recollection existing within a plurality of layers: fragmented and coloured by emotion.

This collection of works presents the artist’s personal investigation into their place within the natural environment of Aotearoa. Price’s terrains are inspired by lived experiences of locations predominantly from the Waikato and Tāmaki Makaurau.

The artist’s use of colour plays into the idea that memory can be expressed as a multiplicity of fissures, fractured yet bold. With a focus on self-perception, the artist presents representations of the self, silhouetted, not as he existed in time but as a temporary observer of moments as they play out in his mind.

Presenting this evocation of experience; memories rematerialize by the artist’s hand in these landscapes, in a painterly stream of consciousness.

“Each lived moment is played out by a multiplicity of emotions, and every moment holds happy, sad or angry sentiments” says Price.

Constantly oscillating and refocusing, these scenes offer alternative ways to encounter and experience the world, and ask the viewer to question the way reality exists through our physical interactions with space and the ways in which our memories can manifest. Price asks: “How do we connect to past moments? And memories that change over time?”

Price completed a Master of Fine Arts at Whitecliffe College of Arts in 2022. Since then the artist has exhibited widely in both solo and curated group exhibitions including: Material Instinct, Depot Artspace 2023, Chemical Landscapes: Locality and Complacency, ODDLY Projectspace 2022, and Sections, Window Gallery, The University of Auckland 2021.

Opening Event: Wednesday 15 May, 5 – 7pm.

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