MICHAEL MORLEY
The Get Out - Recent Paintings 

Stepdown is delighted to present The Get Out – Recent Paintings, an exhibition by Kōpūtai Port Chalmers-based artist and musician Michael Morley. Spanning both gallery spaces, the exhibition brings together two interconnected bodies of work: recent paintings upstairs and Les Petites Flechettes, a series of razor-cut stencil works on paper downstairs.

Upstairs, recent paintings operate as exercises in a creeping nostalgia and a longing for the impossible. That reference to the impossible can be located in music, and more fully interrogated on and around the dancefloor. Dance and music become the focus of a ritual of social cohesion, where chaotic motion reveals hidden symmetries through extended observation and meditation. Instantaneous, stuttering, momentary instances are looped and shifted, extending towards the infinite in diverse approaches to recording ecstasy, community, freedom, and joy. These fleeting experiences are captured as memories of the real or constructed from fantasies of the unreal. They can also be read as scenes from an imagined disco-themed video game.

Downstairs, Les Petites Flechettes presents razor-cut stencil paintings attempting to remake themselves through a wilful disregard for personal safety and public nuisance. Wall-tested across Kōpūtai and Ōtepoti during the plague years, these works on paper record the tentative first steps into a speculative psychogeography, when the world vanishes and references dissolve. Aided by a pharmapedia of natural medicines as precursors, preventatives, and salves.

To open the exhibition, Michael Morley will present a live ambient environment utilising a plant /synth interface in the gallery space.
The following day, a sound performance event will be held at John Scott–designed Kamaka Pottery in Bridge Pa.

Thee Righteous Yeah! – Do Botanicals
Opening Celebration & Performance: Friday 24 July・5pm
All welcome.