03 Magazine: September 01, 2023

68 Magazine | Art
this larger commission with the National Gallery of Australia.
Everything has kind of led into bigger and bigger projects.”
Simon has a different skill set to her, she says.
“He is able to do these incredible things with the analogue
drawings that I make.
“My toolkit is pen and paper. His is this digital world.”
Among other things, Jess likes that their work together
has made the art accessible to more people. Not only does
it fill gallery spaces but can also be downloaded from online
VR stores.
“That is kind of interesting for us because it reaches the
online gaming community, who wouldn’t necessarily be
able to catch one of our exhibitions in a gallery, or have the
inclination to go to a gallery.”
The planetarium project, XYZZY, has the potential to
extend that reach further still.
“A lot of planetariums, they are all over the world, and
they are often in these weird, out-of-the-way places, off the
beaten track – like the Roswell Museum has a planetarium
attached to it. It means that the work can travel after
it has been premiered at Otago. It means it can travel
to planetariums all over the world, and hopefully reach
these audiences that might not have so much access to
contemporary art.”
But it is by no means all about the digital and the
projectable for Jess – the gallery space at Tūhura that is
hosting Terminus is wallpapered with tangible examples of
her work, creating a physical world within which the VR
experiences play out.
“I think I am definitely a maximalist by nature,” Jess says
of this layered approach. “That is evident in my drawings
and the detail and the orders of obsession I get into with
the drawings themselves; but then in terms of the audience
experience, going in to see one of our exhibitions in a
gallery, I like to offer a level of generosity of what people are
going to see in the gallery.”
It is all designed to have an impact. And it does.
People cry, then email Jess later to say how profoundly
affected they were.
For some, the VR worlds are quite dystopian; human forms
locked in inescapable cycles of action and formidable creatures
summoned from the id.
Jess gets that, though it has never been her intention or
her experience.
“But I never wanted to be didactic or tell people what their
experience should be. I think there is enough space amongst it
all for people to project their own stuff into the cracks.”
Transporting their work to the planetarium is a whole new
ball game, though their VR experience helped in terms of
considering space beyond a flat screen, she says.
“There were all these other new considerations to make.
The fact that you can’t show the floor in a planetarium.”
They had to think about where the horizons were and how
to transport people from one place to another – all without
inducing nausea.
“You have a tendency, you want to throw all these
psychedelic patterns or weird falling movements.”
During the making, Simon would take demos into the
Wellington or Otago Museum planetarium to test them.
As a piece of film, it is very driven by the pieces of music,
the commissions for which stipulated a tone or a mood,
Jess says.
“Then those were pieced together in tonal journey, or an
emotional journey and then the musical tracks influenced a
lot of the imagery, the visuals that Simon was choosing to
accompany it.
“There is a narrative but … like a lot of our work, there
is always a journey or a quest and it is always very cyclical.
We always return to the beginning. They were kind of the
themes that Terminus was based around as well. So there is
a narrative in it but it is more an emotional narrative, it’s not
language-based.”
Terminus runs at Tūhura Otago Museum until February 25, 2024.
“In joy or sadness,
flowers are our
constant friends”
- Okakura Kakuzo
24 August -
18 September 2023
OPENING EVENT
26 August 2pm
AKAROA
TAPESTRY
GALINA KIM
victoriaflorists.co.nz
Cnr Wairakei and Idris Rds
Phone 351 7444
+64 3 325 1944
littlerivergallery.com
art@littlerivergallery.com
Main Rd, Little River