Lorene Taurerewa's charcoal and ink drawings will be on show at The American Indian Community House Gallery in New York from October 17-21.

The work is influenced by her Samoan-Polynesian and European heritage. Her creations embody the stark contrast and disparity of native traditions such as the duty of remembrance, the lives of ancestors through mind and blood-lineage, and their presence beyond death, with the bleak history of a colonial society. Lorene Taurerewa's charcoal and ink drawings will be on show at The American Indian Community House Gallery in New York from October 17-21.

The work is influenced by her Samoan-Polynesian and European heritage. Her creations embody the stark contrast and disparity of native traditions such as the duty of remembrance, the lives of ancestors through mind and blood-lineage, and their presence beyond death, with the bleak history of a colonial society.The artist says New Zealand is isolated from the homogenizing currents of international exposure where the strains of a very recent migrant history and a fractious cultural interface has created a unique culture and conceptual influence in her work.

Her large-scale figurative charcoal drawings are distinguished for the inscrutable, monumental, still figures which occupy a middle-distance; an inaccessible space visually created by dense black fields combined with graceful lines. These imposing large-scale works (8'x 5') combine an intense, powerful and unyielding dramatic presence with a subtle emotional complexity creating layers of communication between drawing and viewer.

In tangent, her delicate ink work captures tiny figures caught in fluid, seeping black, which visually enacts bizarre narratives in these small (11" x 9") drawings on paper and duralar. These narratives are formed intuitively, running and turning in the flowing of the ink, resulting in strange, quirky, picaresque scenes representing the fraught memories of fragmented lives. The unsettled ghosts and lost souls of her inheritance inhabit her figures, visually generating power, grace, loneliness and fragility who play out the narratives of Ms Taurerewa's work.

Taurerewa spends her time in both New York and New Zealand. She has been exhibiting internationally for close to a decade and has been in over thirty shows. Lorene recently completed a Residency at the National Art Studio of the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art. She has recently exhibited in Los Angeles at the New Zealand Consulate General residency and will be exhibiting at the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia in 2009. She is part of private and public collections world-wide, with recent acquisitions including the Queensland Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and the James Wallace Arts Trust in New Zealand. In October, Lorene is going to be a subject in an upcoming New Zealand arts documentary Lorene Taurerewa, produced by Kirsty McDonald, the filming of which will coincide with and take place at the opening of this exhibition.

Formed in 1977, The American Indian Community House Gallery supports and promotes contemporary Native art in both traditional and non-traditional forms, educates the public about the diverse experiences of contemporary Native people, and acts as a resource for the local and national Native American arts community.

American Indian Community House Gallery
11 Broadway, 2nd Floor (opposite the National Museum of the American Indian)
New York, NY
www.aich.org
Opening October 17, 2008 at 6:30pm
Show runs to October 21, 2008

06/10/08