Your Mind is on Holiday

Yasmin Dubrau’s show YourMind is on Holiday is an extraordinary kind of homecoming, connecting diverse affective homeplaces (Heretaunga, Murihuku, Japan) through contingent devices, objects, media. All the works are linked to Murihuku by lines from Invercargill-born Chris Knox’s spatially and creatively bewildered song HP5, which gives the show its title.

What do you say when your brain is on holiday? Who do you pay when you head for your home With souvenirs of nothing real? … Who else can know all the stuff you've got crammed inside The head you call your own?

Tribute to Knox notwithstanding, Dubrau’s show is much more playful about the holiday homecoming. She translates it into gallery space through her own extensive biographical links to Japan, in a multi-parallax connection between paintings and objects referenced to sushi, stones, shadows and mountains/ landscape.

The mountains and stones might be related to rugged and stony landscapes in Southland, beaches and coastlines in Southland, whose expanse, beaches and coastlines were “rugged and stony” but they might also be Japanese landscapes, that work through different perspectives and scales. All of these elements she renders with a joyful and colourful calligraphic brush in a large-scale musical notation that floats in and occupies the gallery space in large scrolls of paper. There are photos, cutouts, cotton woven mats and paintings turned into origami landforms; and rendering Knox’ words into her own biographic medium of Japanese ceramic. So, your mind might be on holiday, but its working with senses and delighted affect at every level, so as to let these things connect.

– David Craig

Art Attic Gallery, Waihōpai Invercargill

2024