Major Exhibitions

Precious and Pathetic, a Small Measures Collaborative exhibition

2023, Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Small Measures’ earliest collaborative works were primarily ‘performance drawings’ – a series of one-off performances that explored the creative languages of both music and drawing. In 2019, following a Buinho Creative Hub Residency in Portugal, their experimental and improvised practice shifted in focus and marked the beginning of their short-duration film works. With humour and irony playing a key role within their practice, Precious and Pathetic brings together a group of recent works that comment on the absurdity of contemporary life. From seemingly small gestures to combat climate change, including composting practices and attempts to counteract sea-level rise, to the certification processes surrounding a self-contained vehicle, Precious and Pathetic highlights the overregulation, dysfunction and frustration found in everyday tasks and systems.

Grass All the Greener, 2022 June, Olga Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand

​In "Grass all the Greener", Otepoti Dunedin-based artist Hannah Joynt continues her exploration of the absurd through incongruous juxtapositions of utilitarian and opulent objects and scenarios. In Pontoon Piano (2022), for example, Joynt positions a piano and freestanding pink lampshade on a pontoon. Where a pontoon more commonly signifies aquatic activities, the piano and lampshade are companionably found in domestic spaces. Despite the jarring incongruity, all the works in this body of work involve or are situated in the context of leisure pursuits. The Annual Event (2022) takes a harvest festival or agricultural show as its origin but attenuates the co-ordinates. Instead of a woodchopping competition, the contestants chop watermelons, and do so with an array of implements from axe to rake, spanners and spade. Elsewhere in the festival, participants tackle oversized corncob pieces with a two-person crosscut saw and giant standing cacti with knives.
Joynt eschews hyperrealism for a naive, representational style of realism that is most successful in the exhibition’s largest painting, Making Your Leisure Your Pleasure (2022). In the absence of crisp delineation, the activities of a busy painting such as The Annual Event become somewhat blurry and indistinct. However, the larger scale of Making Your Leisure Your Pleasure enables Joynt to attend to details while still retaining definition. Among the waterlogged willow trees and pink flamingo floating craft (small boats, peddle boats), Joynt depicts flamingo birds, abseilers, sunbathers and ubiquitous orange road cones. The bareness of the trees in what otherwise appears to be summer adds to the disquiet. Robyn Maree Pickens, Otago Daily Times, June 16 2022

The Absurds, 2021 Jan/Feb, Olga Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand

Dual

2020 CICA Museum, Seoul, South Korea.

An Iteration of Drawn to Sound (see below) traveled to CICA Museum in Seoul. Unfortunately due to COVID 19 we were unable attend the opening and make work live in the space.

Drawn to Sound

2019, Collaboration, solo exhibition, Ashburton Art Gallery, Ashburton

Hannah Joynt is a contemporary drawing practitioner who works in a range of media, processes and scales. Jane Venis a musician, performance artist and maker of sculptural musical instruments. Drawn to Sound is a performance project in which they address the question “How do we collaborate successfully with two very different creative practices in order to explore new territories within a contemporary context?” In real time, Jane plays a range of instruments in an improvisational way and Hannah responds to the music interpreting the sound as a large scale drawing. However, there is a moment at some point early in the performance when Jane has started to respond to Hannah’s mark making, as the drawing has the ability to ‘draw out’ phrases from the instrument in ‘dual improvisation’. In their performances they initiate dialogue with each other in their own individual creative languages. How might a mark be interpreted? How might sound be interpreted? As the notion of improvisation and spontaneous expression is common to both drawing and music/sound performance, what will collaborative performances look and sound like? Although the process is largely spontaneous, the drawings can also be ‘read’ as a narrative, and the performance has a theatrical storytelling quality to it. In this exhibition, along with making and filming new work in the gallery from the 3rd - 7th Nov 2019, they present videos of other live performances, a short documentary on their collaborative process and new audio works and drawings created during their recent artist residency in Messejana, Portugal. They have also exhibited and performed in a group exhibition Lines of Thought at CICA Museum in Seoul in 2017 and are returning to CICA in 2020 for solo exhibition.

Grey Willow

2019, solo exhibition, Olga Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand.

The Grey Willow arrived with early European setters in the 1860's and now thrives near waterways, lakes and wetlands. Like many introduced species, grey willows have colonised so successfully that they have made it onto the National Pest (plant) List. Harts Creek on Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere is a place where the spread of grey willows has seriously endangering native plants and have been categorised as an infestation. Yet, when I journeyed through these willows I found them mesmerising and tranquil. The tension between my experience and the environmental reality of the pest plant compelled me to use this site as the main subject for a body of chalk pastel drawings.

New Perspectives on Landscape

2017 - 2019 New Perspectives was a touring group exhibition of five recent Masters of Fine Arts graduates from the Dunedin School of Art, Fiona Van Oyen, Sue Pearce, Robyn Bardas, Miranda Joseph, and Hannah Joynt. Capturing landscapes and the natural world has a long tradition of inspring artists throughout art history and the five artists in this exhibition continue to be drawn to this subject and provide us with a fresh approach about the places we inhabit.

This exhibition was hosted shown at the Ashburton Art Gallery, The Millennium Gallery (Blenheim), The Forester Gallery (Oamaru) and the Eastern Southland Gallery and curated by Clive Humphreys from the Dunedin School of Art.

This exhibition has been reviewed in The Press see link below: Warren Feeney - New Perspectives on Landscape 

A Trick of the Land

2017, DSA Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand

This exhibition explores different drawing processes and typologies in a process of finding ways to express phenomenological experiences with the land as well as critiquing the landscape genre. Works range from a vast series of small sketches made en plein air during long walking journeys to detailed studies focusing on textural qualities to denote perspective. This exhibition is as much about

Te Araroa Drawing Expedition

2015, DSA Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand

This project was a solo expedition in which over five months Hannah walked the Te Araroa trail (a long distance trail that stretches 3157km down the length of New Zealand) and documented the trip through drawing. Over two hundred sketches were made. The expedition was an investigation of landscape, liminality, place, identity and drawing. 

Places in an Exotic Forest; The Naseby Drawings

2015, The Artist Room Gallery, Dunedin.

Large pastel drawings featuring Naseby forest. These works focused on exploring a textural, luminous landscape subject (Naseby Forest in the Maniototo) with in a square format by wrapping the scene around strong abstract, geometric compositions.

Strange Vacation

2014, The Artists Room Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand

This body of work was an enquiry into the curious phenomenon of afternoon light and cast shadows in natural settings (mostly).

Grieving Over a Dead Fish: Secret Mens Business

2012, Temple Gallery, Dunedin

Never Trust Your Cape

2010, COCA Gallery, Christchurch

An Alien Snuck Into Class and No One Noticed

2009, COCA, Christchurch