Beverly Rhodes - 'Harbour'
Canaday Gallery, 7th–25th April 2010
Harbour: a port providing anchorage as well as a place of shelter and refuge. Concealment, hiding secrets, brooding and harbouring resentments. These works suggest a dreamlike imaginary world where scale is altered allowing the child to take control. (Beverly Rhodes 2010).
Since 2001 Beverly Rhodes has developed a body of work that explores the behaviour of humanity as something known and unknowable. Often focussing on the small detail and rituals of daily life she has held a series of exhibition whose titled allude to human experience as familiar and fragmented: Exhibitions include: With Half Closed Eyes (2005), Transitional Objects (2004), Camouflage (2003), and Absence, Presence and simulations (2001). This new body of work in Harbour is similarly evocative, with paintings whose narratives are informed by a protective and threatening darkness and light that offers shelter and warning to the figures that inhabit the picture plane.
Rhodes has exhibited extensively over the past ten years in Wellington and Christchurch, completing her Masters in Fine Arts at Melbourne’s RMIT University in 2004 and in 2008 she was the recipient of the Elizabeth Grierson Merit Award in the Walker & Hall Art Award in Waiheke.