Bella den Boogert is a Tāmaki-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice works between the mediums of sculpture and printmaking. Using text and found objects, their practice explores the internet-driven culture of performance, self-presentation, intimacy, and identity in the digital age, often using humour as a way to examine these exchanges and forms.
Sav Mattyasovszky is a Tāmaki-based artist primarily working in sculpture. Predominantly working with casting materials, her practice explores and traces the relationship between memory and commemorative objects, keepsakes, and souvenirs, setting the uncertainty of memory into a physical realm.
Their current exhibition together at Window Gallery, Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth, brings together their practices in a collaborative exploration of devotional gifts and objects as physical confirmations of intent. Creating this dynamic dialogue of material form and memory, the exhibition brings together this string of collected memory objects – a crown, overflowing letterbox, silicone lock, a steel flagstick – like a diagram or system, hybridised, modified, and replicated as physical representations of the uneasy function of memory itself.
Strung together by this chain, den Boogert and Mattyasovszky imagine these memories distorting, layering, and recycling themselves through a kind of memory machine, so far as the keeper of these objects themselves begins to detach their emblematic value from their physical, removing this sentimentality or fetishisation once attached to its form and seeing these objects for what they really are.
Keeping these gifts in the glass box of Window Gallery, the viewer is invited to engage in this act of looking, but not touching - the glass of the gallery space separately the viewer and these objects, acting like a kind of barrier of restraint, encasing these items like a museum display for the delicate and archival, almost becoming the keepsake box itself.
Sof caught up with Bella and Sav about Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth and their overall practices
