The first survey exhibition of the work of Californian artist Meg Cranston opens at ARTSPACE in early August. The Pleasure of Obvious Problems will include a selection of Cranston's work in sculpture, performance and mixed media installation, spanning her 20-year career. It will also include new works created especially for the ARTSPACE exhibition.

Image: Meg Cranston, Rock Bottom (2005)The first survey exhibition of the work of Californian artist Meg Cranston opens at ARTSPACE in early August. The Pleasure of Obvious Problems will include a selection of Cranston's work in sculpture, performance and mixed media installation, spanning her 20-year career. It will also include new works created especially for the ARTSPACE exhibition.

Image: Meg Cranston, Rock Bottom (2005)The exhibition's title reflects Cranston's theory about art: "Art makes abstract concepts tangible. It makes problems, love or death or power or whatever it is, it makes those issues visible. The best art makes complex ideas obvious. That's the pleasure of art".

Of the abstract ideas, Cranston has gone for some of the biggest - albeit usually in an absurd way. In the work Volcano Trash and Ice Cream, a giant pistachio ice cream cone is shown projected on the wall. It drips slowly until all the ice cream has sluiced away.

Cranston sees the work as being about the nature of life: "How the forces of nature are affecting us, how we reflect on our mortality - that's just too big, too abstract, for visual art. A melting ice cream cone is easier to see and to relate to."

One of Cranston's best-known works, The Complete Works of Jane Austen (1991), gives form to the invisible experience of reading. The large inflatable sculpture was designed to contain the amount of air the artist's lungs would exchange while reading the complete works of the English author (100,000 litres). She describes the work as "a monument to the impact Austen's writing had on me".

In conjunction with the exhibition at ARTSPACE, Meg Cranston is the Artist in Residence at Elam School of Fine Arts (Elam), National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at The University of Auckland from 16 July until 17 August 2007. The Elam Residency Project is generously supported by arts patron Jenny Gibbs.

When: 4 August - 15 September 2007
Where: ARTSPACE, 300 Karangahape Road, Auckland

11/7/07