Rohan Wealleans
Rohan Wealleans | New Zealand b.1977 | The road to tomorrow (detail) 2009 | Mixed media | 177 x 120cm | Image courtesy: The artist and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington | Photograph: Stuart Carroll
b.1977 Invercargill, New Zealand
Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand
Rohan Wealleans’s practice is a unique fusion of painting and sculpture. Wealleans makes intricate and tactile objects from a broad array of materials, including paint, polystyrene, rope, fishing buoys, fibreglass and ceramic beads. Bulbous forms are then crafted using a laborious process that involves coating the sculptures with up to 300 layers of house paint. Once completed, these dense surfaces are excised with a knife to reveal a richly coloured underbelly, as well as making a performative link to the artist’s fascination with B-grade horror and slasher films. The under-colours resemble millefiori glass or a lunar landscape, and are a literal evocation of the artist’s interest in exposing that which is hidden. In recent works, Wealleans has created a fictional Pacific island with its own set of customs and deities. A self-portrait of the artist as a monster who is the ‘slave of the cannibal God’ both parodies concepts of identity and reveals his roguish approach to considerations of his own cultural history. APT6 will present both painting and sculpture by Wealleans, as well as his Venus flytrap-like ‘horrorgami’ works, in which trashy horror-film posters spurt paper shards among viscous, visceral layers of paint.
Exhibitions (solo): Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2008; Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2006; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2006. Exhibitions (group): TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, Australia, 2008; ‘Just Painting’, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2006; 26th São Paulo Bienal, Brazil, 2004.
Video
View Rohan Wealleans’s artist performance from the APT6 Opening weekend
