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Email: natashamatilasmith@gmail.com
Instagram: @natashamatilasmith I (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine, Sale'aumua, Pākehā) am an artist and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, and I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Auckland in 2014. My practice often deals with social exchanges and anxieties, across installation and digital contexts. Using online imagery and ‘confessional’ punchy text, I am making a commentary about the intimate and obsessive nature of lust and romance, and how societies assertion of these expectations can result in performative ‘love’. Yet in a wider sense, my work is about how these social expectations influence or rather construct every aspect of our lives. I use the internet as a material and source of communicating ideas because of its wide-accessibility and potential to spread information at a rapid pace meanwhile noting how the internet has become an emotional extension of our bodies. My recent exhibitions include Twenty-four-seven, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, NZ (2019), I will never run out of lies nor love, Bus Projects, Melbourne AU (2019), Between you and me, ST PAUL St Gallery, NZ (2018) and Hard Feelings, The Honeymoon Suite, AU (2018). I have contributed to numerous online and print publications such as Un Projects (AU), Matters Aotearoa and Art New Zealand. In 2018, I was selected to be a participant of the Goethe-Institut Feminism and Pop Culture Networking Tour in Berlin and again in Indonesia in 2019 with the same group of practitioners, looking at feminist initiatives that involved pop-culture. In late 2018, I was also invited to be the Guest Editor for Runway Australian Experimental Art’s Issue #38 focusing on the theme of Spectacle. My work as an artist and a writer - I think both lines of inquiry inform one another - is about my ability to articulate modern anxieties, particularly with regards to being a Pacific woman, growing up in postcolonial society. Consequently, my voice offers a very relevant and current critique of not only art, but what it means to navigate the world as a Pacific woman in modern times. |
Me and Cody Fern at Hyde Park Sydney, Digital collage (2018)
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