Teething - reviewed
Teething
Ophelia King
Weasel Gallery, Hamilton
22 January - 22 February 2020
Reviewed by Peter Dornauf for EyeContact 12 February 2020
Ophelia King, Bruise (left) and Hickey (right) 2019
Ophelia King’s ‘Diary’?
Question. In the world of the visual arts, what might one nominate as the equivalent of ‘chick lit’? A good place to start might be the current exhibition on at Weasel Gallery, Hamilton. It is the work of Ophelia King, teasingly entitled Teething, and you could be forgiven for thinking it might be a sort of counterpart to Bridget Jones’s Diary.
It is in fact a kind of diary, a potted history of the early stages of romance, or as King herself puts it, “the honeymoon stage of her relationship.”
This is art at its most autobiographical, but there is no shame in that. Half of literature—and a greater proportion of art—pumped out in the twentieth century has had personal content through the creator fidgeting away at the base of the production of the material. Almost all artists here in New Zealand, from Colin McCahon to Shane Cotton to Kushana Bush, reach around inside their own psyche for material to work with.
Ophelia King, It's Not All Rainbows and Butterflies It's Compromise 2019