Artspace presents the work of three artists, Robert Hood, Chris Kraus and Isabel Nolan.

Robert Hood is a Christchurch based artist who utilises a range of media from photography and installation to video and found objects. Chris Kraus is a Wellington born, L.A. based experimental filmmaker and author. Isabel Nolan is a Dublin based artist.Artspace presents the work of three artists, Robert Hood, Chris Kraus and Isabel Nolan.

Robert Hood is a Christchurch based artist who utilises a range of media from photography and installation to video and found objects. Chris Kraus is a Wellington born, L.A. based experimental filmmaker and author. Isabel Nolan is a Dublin based artist.Robert Hood's work evokes a post-apocalyptic tone embracing diverse influences from the paranormal to stock markets.

"Rob Hood deals in paranormal oddities; apocryphal worlds that incubate hope; utopias only a hair's breadth away from sliding into the mire and those seething bedrocks of capitalism, the financial markets." Says Robyn Pickens.

Robert Hood was the recipient of the Olivia Spencer-Bower residency in 2007. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and was part of Headway, the annual new artists show at Artspace in 2006.

Selected solo exhibitions include projects at Jonathon Smart Gallery, The Blue Oyster Trust, The Physics Room and High Street Project. Robert Hood graduated with a B.F.A in 1998 from the University of Canterbury.

This is the first time film and video works by Chris Kraus can be viewed in their entirety in New Zealand.

Vast in scope and both visually and textually experimental her film and video works span from 1983-1995. As an independent filmmaker working in New York in the early 1980s Kraus's interests range from; the myth of literary figures such as Antonin Artaud and Frank O'Hara to crime scene photography, sadomasochism and meditions upon memory, nostalgia and longing.

Kraus is also known as a writer. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices of American fiction." She is the author of novels I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor and Video Green and is a contributor on art and culture to many international publications including Index, Artext and Art and America. She was the founding editor of the Native Agents imprint, new fiction series for Semiotext(e).

Isabel Nolan is a Dublin based artist. Drawing is central to Nolan's art practice; she describes it as catching a thought, a way to begin:

"Drawing is a great way of describing anything - an object, an idea or a feeling. Aesthetically I like its variability, it can be hard, soft, cold, warm, really conceptual or very emotive, often it is, or at least it appears, very direct and personal - the human touch."

During her stay in Auckland Nolan will be undertaking research at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Nolan has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, including at the Project Arts Centre and the Goethe Institute, Dublin. She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 has participated in exhibitions at the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Robert Hood, Cyclical Adjustment Vacuum Idle Manifold
Chris Kraus, Plastic Is Leather, Fuck You: Chris Kraus Films and Videos 1983 - 1995
Isabel Nolan, The Trance of Inaction

Exhibition dates: 12 September - 18 October

Curated by Brian Butler

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Image: Chris Kraus, Plastic Is Leather, Fuck You: Chris Kraus Films and Videos 1983 - 1995