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Bridging Worlds Ep1 | Lucien Rizos & Gregory O'Brien
Lunchtime Talk recorded on 17 November 2022
Lucien Rizos in conversation with Gregory O'Brien.
Gerald O’Brien was like a father to Lucien Rizos, yet throughout their time together O’Brien never mentioned his lifelong creative project which is featured in Rizos’s exhibition, Everything. Join Rizos in conversation with Wellington artist and writer Gregory O’Brien as they discuss and try to make sense of O’Brien’s life and the fantasy world he kept secret.
Gregory O'Brien is a Wellington poet, essayist and painter who curated exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009. While there, he worked with Lucien Rizos on his 2005 exhibition Where I find myself. Gregory O'Brien's monograph on painter Don Binney is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2023.
Everything is a project by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Lucien Rizos. Over three years he has documented the possessions of his uncle, Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017), Labour Party MP for Island Bay (1969–78) and local businessman. Rizos has organised his documentation into more than 60 magazines that canvass everything O’Brien kept relating to his public and private life. He has also made detailed composite photographs of his uncle’s bookshelves as an extended portrait of someone he was close to and deeply admired. This exhibition brings Rizos’s large-scale photographs, magazines and scanned imagery together with actual artefacts from O’Brien’s archive. It focuses in particular on Rizos’s most startling find. This is his uncle’s secret art project worked on from childhood well into his adult life that invented a parallel world with an alternate geography, nation states, public figures and histories. The exhibition presents invented maps, lists, newspapers and hand-written histories as well as hundreds of his cut-out and hand-painted figures that represent named personages holding public office in his imagined world. Working with curator Robert Leonard, Rizos both offers up his uncle’s secret life to its first public scrutiny and tests the capacity of his medium to effectively tell O’Brien’s story.
This was the first in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.
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By Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka ToiLunchtime Talk recorded on 17 November 2022
Lucien Rizos in conversation with Gregory O'Brien.
Gerald O’Brien was like a father to Lucien Rizos, yet throughout their time together O’Brien never mentioned his lifelong creative project which is featured in Rizos’s exhibition, Everything. Join Rizos in conversation with Wellington artist and writer Gregory O’Brien as they discuss and try to make sense of O’Brien’s life and the fantasy world he kept secret.
Gregory O'Brien is a Wellington poet, essayist and painter who curated exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009. While there, he worked with Lucien Rizos on his 2005 exhibition Where I find myself. Gregory O'Brien's monograph on painter Don Binney is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2023.
Everything is a project by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Lucien Rizos. Over three years he has documented the possessions of his uncle, Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017), Labour Party MP for Island Bay (1969–78) and local businessman. Rizos has organised his documentation into more than 60 magazines that canvass everything O’Brien kept relating to his public and private life. He has also made detailed composite photographs of his uncle’s bookshelves as an extended portrait of someone he was close to and deeply admired. This exhibition brings Rizos’s large-scale photographs, magazines and scanned imagery together with actual artefacts from O’Brien’s archive. It focuses in particular on Rizos’s most startling find. This is his uncle’s secret art project worked on from childhood well into his adult life that invented a parallel world with an alternate geography, nation states, public figures and histories. The exhibition presents invented maps, lists, newspapers and hand-written histories as well as hundreds of his cut-out and hand-painted figures that represent named personages holding public office in his imagined world. Working with curator Robert Leonard, Rizos both offers up his uncle’s secret life to its first public scrutiny and tests the capacity of his medium to effectively tell O’Brien’s story.
This was the first in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.