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Dan Arps

Practice: painting / installation

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Considered one of New Zealand's leading contemporary artists, Dan Arps has also exhibited with considerable success in Australia, although recognition beyond the Southern hemisphere is (for the moment) scant.

A pity, because Arps' playfully abject practice chimes well with similar European and American tendencies whilst evidencing a distinctive new voice, particularly in his heavily encrusted or encaged paintings which wickedly engage in the very current debate on painterly objecthood.

While most of Arps' works - which, besides painting, encompass ceramics, bricolage, collage and disciplines with a similar accent on the hand-crafted - manifest a strong sense of self-identity, most are originally construed as participants in a performative collaboration between object and specific space.

These obsessively detailed and suggestively titled environments (Gestapo Pussy Ranch; Charlie Sheen; Affirmation Dungeon) cavort with notions of decrepitude, paranoia and moral uncertainty alongside a simple sense of joie de vivre; their ultimate aim the pursuit of Joycean-style epiphany amid the detritus of the everyday.