One hundred years after Sir Truby King founded the Plunket Society to "help the mothers and save the babies", Wellington artist Bryce Galloway presents Daddy Doo, a video installation inspired by the world of male parenting. Featuring the artist wrestling his two-year-old daughter and breastfeeding by strapping bottles to his chest, the exhibition is a response to becoming a father and the modern pressure to capture a range of family moments on home video.One hundred years after Sir Truby King founded the Plunket Society to "help the mothers and save the babies", Wellington artist Bryce Galloway presents Daddy Doo, a video installation inspired by the world of male parenting. Featuring the artist wrestling his two-year-old daughter and breastfeeding by strapping bottles to his chest, the exhibition is a response to becoming a father and the modern pressure to capture a range of family moments on home video."I guess the typical home video is a lot of tottering first steps, beaming mothers - giggling children. The truth is, that's just not how I respond. Everyday life is probably a lot more fraught."

Bryce Galloway is a Wellington artist and lecturer who has released a series of albums since the early 1990s with his art school band Wendyhouse. Since 2001 he has been releasing a monthly fanzine entitled Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, which has chronicled his life as a parent over the past four years.

Frequently comic and surreal, Galloway's work finds the strange in the everyday.

"There aren't many males out there when you go to the park ... I'm always hanging out with mothers. A big part of the show is just questioning ideas of normalcy or PC or whatever."

One of the first such deviations was a wrestling match with his six-month-old daughter while dressed as a Mexican wrestler. Galloway subsequently repeated the video every six months, an amusing alternative to putting a notch on the wall to chart the kids height.

Consisting of seven videos for seven monitors which fade in and out, much of the footage in Daddy Doo was shot at home while looking after the kids. The exhibition was almost subtitled "or how to exploit one's children", as Galloway remains painfully aware that his own daughters are somewhat unwitting identities in this installation. Rather than apologise for this liberty however, Galloway is pleased to court political incorrectness as a challenge to the current cultural sentimentality that frames our appreciation of the childhood experience.

What's more, the kids are loving it. "Sadie remembers some of the things we shot as a cool game, and she gets to see me on Dad's research day. She stills asks 'can we play that game where I tie you up and throw my teddies at you?'"

Like Galloway's fanzine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, Galloway's video record is determinedly lo-fi, though some post-production audio and basic effects do ask the audience to ponder the footage as something other than a personal archive.

Film Archive mediagallery curator Mark Williams says Galloway is one of the most original artists in New Zealand. "Bryce has a unique ability to spy the absurdity and comedy in life's mundane activities and make that his art. It's a beautifully simple idea. After all what could be more strange and normal than being a parent?"

When: 20 July - 4 August 2007
Where: NZ Film Archive mediagallery, cnr Taranaki and Ghuznee Sts, Wellington

16/7/07