Trish Clark Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Phil Dadson. Halfway through his 12-year project – visual music in twelve movements, produced daily during sequential months in consecutive years, begun in January 2014 – Dadson presents June Music plus accompaniments including a new post-Covid video. One of this country’s most inventive and innovative senior artists, Dadson’s June Music explores contours of harmony and ratios of colour, rhythm and balance in unexpected ways.

Also on view is Dadson’s 2017 April Music, the kinetic score of its daily filming delivering acute poetry of local landscapes both abstracted and emblematic, now more deeply evocative in our post-Covid renegotiation of local and foreign travel.

Dadson has been pushing the boundaries of sound and intermedia art in New Zealand since the 70s. His highly inventive transdisciplinary approach to making art includes solo performances and exhibitions, building experimental musical instruments and sonic objects, video / sound installation, music composition, graphic scores, drawing, sound sculptures and improvisations with invented instruments. Video has been a constant passion for Dadson, as much for its ability to synergistically combine image and sound as for its unique physicality.

Appointed to the Sculpture Department at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1977, Dadson held the position of Head of Intermedia/Time-based arts from 1986 – 2001. Throughout his career Dadson has been the recipient of many key awards and fellowships, enabling numerous international residency, exhibition and festival opportunities, most recently the Fulbright-Wallace Arts Trust Award at Headlands, San Francisco, in 2016. In 2001 he received a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate award, in 2003 an Antarctic Artist Fellowship and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2005.