B-Sides, Rarities and
Treasures from the Dunedin
Public Art Gallery Car Park
Jay Hutchinson
Opening
Friday
February 25
Runs to March 18
Hutchinson inflects his needlework with a ‘street’ sensibility that continually
challenges the high art/mass culture divide.
He forcefully expresses the deeply flawed and fractured cultures and ideologies that plague the twenty-first century––in which he and his viewers remain inextricably caught.
"B Sides, Rarities, and Treasures from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Car Park", Jay Hutchinson (Olga Gallery)
One of the potential aims of art is to make people look again at things that they would normally disregard — to view things in a new, unexpected light — and in doing so to see them as if for the first time. This is a major feature of the fabric and installation art of Jay Hutchinson.
Hutchinson’s work takes the throwaway, literally, and raises it to a level where it is no longer worthless. Using as his subject discarded scraps and rubbish found on his daily journeys, he reclaims the items by recreating them and reinventing them as intricate and attractive embroidered pieces. This allows us to appreciate that even the detritus of everyday life can have its own surprising and subversive beauty.
Many of Hutchinson’s pieces are hand-embroidered in sewing silk on cotton drill cloth. Other, more massive, installations include urban materials such as tarmac slabs, steel and concrete. Hutchinson’s works subvert the norm, not by simply making high art from low art, but by making high art from scrap. While this makes us reappraise the everyday, it also posits the thought that rubbish, in all its accumulated glory, will become the epitaph of this civilisation, a Rosetta Stone or Bayeux Tapestry from which our history will be deciphered.
James Dignan, Otago Daily Times, March 3 2022
One of the potential aims of art is to make people look again at things that they would normally disregard — to view things in a new, unexpected light — and in doing so to see them as if for the first time. This is a major feature of the fabric and installation art of Jay Hutchinson.
Hutchinson’s work takes the throwaway, literally, and raises it to a level where it is no longer worthless. Using as his subject discarded scraps and rubbish found on his daily journeys, he reclaims the items by recreating them and reinventing them as intricate and attractive embroidered pieces. This allows us to appreciate that even the detritus of everyday life can have its own surprising and subversive beauty.
Many of Hutchinson’s pieces are hand-embroidered in sewing silk on cotton drill cloth. Other, more massive, installations include urban materials such as tarmac slabs, steel and concrete. Hutchinson’s works subvert the norm, not by simply making high art from low art, but by making high art from scrap. While this makes us reappraise the everyday, it also posits the thought that rubbish, in all its accumulated glory, will become the epitaph of this civilisation, a Rosetta Stone or Bayeux Tapestry from which our history will be deciphered.
James Dignan, Otago Daily Times, March 3 2022
Biography
Jay Hutchinson holds a BFA (2003) and an MFA (2008) from the Otago Polytechnic,
School of Fine Art. He exhibits regularly in publicly funded galleries, including the Blue
Oyster Art Project Space (2006, 2007, 2012, 2018), the DPAG (2006, 2008), C3,
Melbourne (2011), Enjoy Gallery (2016), the Dowse Art Museum (2017, 2020), the
Aigantighe Art Gallery (2018), Suter Art Gallery (2019), and the Sarjeant Gallery (2020).
His work has also been widely shown in New Zealand dealer galleries such as Bowen
Galleries (2015), Eskdale Gallery (2018), Bartley and Company (2018), and Olga
Gallery (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022).
From February 2011 through September 2012, Hutchinson directed ‘a gallery,’ at 393
Princes Street, Dunedin, ‘a two-year project’ designed to exhibit artists who, in
Hutchinson’s words, ‘were not being represented in the gallery scene at the time,’ in
which group he included himself. He continues to curate exhibitions under the rubric
‘agallerypresents.com’