Te Tuhi is proud to exhibit Derrick Cherrie’s two-storey high sculpture Landshaft in Auckland’s award-winning Karanga Plaza. Landshaft is designed as a kitset construction allowing it to be temporarily re-situated in new spatial contexts. The sculpture draws on the material qualities and forms of conventional architecture but in a way that directs a range of uncertain spatial and bodily relationships. Inside are pairs of cigarettes perplexingly inserted into the interior cladding as if the structure itself is attempting to imbibe substances from within its own skin. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, its form appears more indefinite as a solid building. Too narrow to allow comfortable human habitation, the sculpture is constructed to entice passerby curiosity but also to inject an element of abnormality into the surrounding built environment.
Cherrie has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand and is regarded as one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. Key to his practice is an investigation into the built environment and its psychological and physiological relationship to the human body. His sculptural works range in scale and share uncanny resemblances to everyday objects, but are unusually shaped to resist conventional function.
Landshaft is a Te Tuhi offsite project realised with the support of Auckland Waterfront Development Agency. Landshaft was partly funded by the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland.
Landshaft was originally exhibited at Te Tuhi as part of Derrick Cherrie's solo exhibition Constituent Parts: Objects and their Discontents in 2012.