The exhibition was held at the Hocken Library and Collections in Dunedin, NZ and inluded works by Iain Cheesman and Neil Berecry Brown.

For each of us these are the first of three related works created for Terminus Public Art Project. More information about Iain and Neil's projects can be found on the Terminus website

exhibition text below

Terminus at the Hocken is the first of a series of events occurring under the title of Terminus 05. At the Hocken three of the artists in the project are forming a new terminal point within the larger network occurring in the South Island. The Artists participating in this gallery based Terminus are Australian based Neil Berecry-Brown, and Dunedin artists Ali Bramwell and Iain Cheesman. Their works look at networks, acts of relocation and the ensuing effects of isolation. They approach the idea of responding to site and context (as formed by the terminus of Port Otago) in three very different ways.

Iain Cheesman is using a playful moment of arrival that refers to both royal and alien visitations, 'We are your friends' becomes more than an iconic greeting as it hovers dangerously, a warning sign driven cynically to the notion of relocation. His work makes a passing comment to colonial dynamics but is generally focussed on the expectation that accompanies a significant arrival. Something has landed or is it a relic, a remnant of what was and what could still be? The disembarking of the Pearly King and Queen from the mother ship looks treacherous, the severe angle of the lime washed ramp posing immediate difficulty. An impending exploration into a brand new world. places the pair in a position of power and possibly.

Neil Berecry-Brown works are process oriented and he has been working directly in the gallery in a temporal manner over the week prior to the opening. He is using elements that relate to flux and the play of ideas and people through a specific place like a working port (as a point of change). These elements include things that he found in the Port area while exploring the site. For Terminus Berecry-Brown views ‘a last port of call’ from an Australasian perspective. Berecry-Brown is interested in the ways that living in both Australia and New Zealand have imbedded in our psyche certain isolatory behaviours, as we are used to being at ‘the end of the line.’ He notes that as neither country has land borders this places incredible emphasis on ports, where movement across our borders is both restricted and funnelled.

Ali Bramwell also uses play and transport as a motif, making reference to rail and road transport networks in a kitset way. She is also referring to the machinery of record keeping that tracks documents and catalogues the different kinds of movement that happen through a terminus such as a port. Bramwell has become a self confessed bureaucrat with a train set; repeating wheels truckle ineffectively, going nowhere fast and the humble cardboard box becomes both the transport and the transported. Obsessing about modes of transport with the longing for departure of someone fed up with driving a desk, Bramwell's off the rails kitsets threatening to invade with the speed and focussed energy of a somnolent office clerk.
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