Paracosm is an exhibition that showcases a range of artists that create in response to experience and existence through ritualistic processes. Each artist’s desire to create is driven by the meditative sensations that are embodied during their making process. The making process is paramount and the final artwork . The significance lies not within the preconceived idea of the end artwork but within the moments and meditative sensations experienced during the creative process itself. Intuition is what guides these artists, translating from our practices to the final artworks. The artists compose the perceptions of their quotidian experience to form a visual language that illustrates their subjective view of the world. These artworks are an offering that invite the viewer to indulge and explore the inner personal realms of the artists. 

This exhibition is explored through multiple mediums; painting, photography, drawing and installation work. Each artist’s work sits on their own but collectively comes together to create a new world. This realm invites the viewer to experience a new perspective of the world through our eyes.

The Longer I carry it, The Heavier it gets, is a culmination of practitioners responding to the human condition. Through exploration of the boundaries of being and coming to be, we present a visual and audio experience enmeshed in darkness, shining light on to our findings. The presence of duality weaves threads through our works engaging with the tensions of tangibility and lived experience. These threads are unravelled into conversations of dissonance between the
customary and contemporary, structures and binaries and the expansion of thought in these
areas. Through recreation, decolonisation and performance we extend our control of narratives
and conflicts inherited by our generation. The digitalisation of self both compresses and
expands the borders of our being. A cyborg is a creature of social reality. As the first generation
raised with our minds in the internet we forgo power hierarchies in nature for manmade social hierarchies. “The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness” (7, Harraway) Working with specificity in subjects revolving around the body and gender, ancestry and whakapapa, entropy and death, we converge on a path where the internal experience of
being meets the external world, this is the border we walk together.
 

The works in The Longer I carry it, The Heavier it invite your engagement through immersion as participation, here, time is an agent of activation. In creating an atmospheric and dynamic curatorial experience through visceral sonic explorations and directed paths of light, this group of artists display their use of art as a projection of identity, or a stepping stone to a reimagined identity. “Darkness
reflects the sun. Blackness reflects nothing. Darkness reflects the sun. Blackness reflects
nothing.” (Horn, Saying Water) Situating themselves as practitioners in the face of an undeniable ecological crisis, deep set individual disempowerment and social inequality. These
fractures in our realities are bandaged with our practices. “Between grief and nothing, I will take
grief.” (Horn, Saying Water ) If apathy is nothing, I will take grief.