Dark Matter is a group exhibition currently on at Melanie Roger Gallery. 

In 2008, contemporary art curator and writer Robert Leonard wrote the essay Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic, describing New Zealand, or Antipodean, Gothic as a turn of expression in New Zealand art in which Ronnie van Hout’s 1992 photographic series ‘Return of The Living Dead’ heralded a shift to viewing our landscape as a kind of haunted space. Reimaging traditional European Gothic expressions in a way unique to New Zealand, it embraces darkness, the unfamiliar, and uneasiness, emerging partly in response to biculturalism as a dominant subject of discourse in New Zealand art in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Exhibiting work by Pōneke-based artists Harry Culy and Simon Attwooll, alongside Tāmaki-based Simon Endres and Kirsten Roberts, Dark Matter delves into the artists’ respective explorations of the gothic. Each artist individually plays with this concept, letting darkness and anxiety push and pull with its surprising softness and quirks that unfold in the works, creating a space that is both haunting yet strangely comforting simultaneously. 

Sof caught up with Melanie Roger about the show.