Billspace
Billspace was a project utilising the billboard space outside the entrance of ARTSPACE on K' Road for artist projects for a period during 2004-2005. The site currently hold permanent signs for ARTSPACE and the New Zealand Film Archive.
June/July 2005
Simon Denny
K'Rd is an abundant feeding ground for the local pigeons and gulls, and a fertile incubator for culture and activity. In Simon Denny's BILLSPACE project 'Natural Fertility', the conflicting nature of a holistic practice and the market driven status of a billboard collide in a graphic work of nutritious abundance.
December 2004/January 2005
Simon Esling
During the Christmas holidays BILLSPACE featured a work by Simon Esling for the flaneurs of K' Road to contemplate until ARTSPACE's first exhibition of 2005. This work is part of a series of drawings relating to architecture and anatomy. Within this series the caravan is symbolic of a nomadic 'limb' cleaved from the organisational structures of suburban architecture and the body politic. The image is both whimsical and melancholic. Perched on a mountaintop the caravan is at once isolated, vulnerable and free.
November 2004
Sriwhana Spong
I Dream of Bali
Nursing a raging hang-over, Sriwhana Spong has bill-pasted a series of posters in her I Dream of Bali series. Crawling from bar to bar along Auckland's K' Rd, Spong - of Balinese decent - requested this obscure cocktail, describing to the bartenders the ingredients, and the process of mixing the exotic Bali Dream. In increasing states of intoxication, Spong has photographed the disparate results against the backdrop of the location, and presented them as colour posters as part of BILLSPACE in November 2004, outside ARTSPACE on K' Rd.
October 2004
Maria Walls
Maria Walls' memory is amazing. Whether it is revealed late at night, or laughed about over early morning coffee, the moment Walls discovers a new person's star sign remains etched on her memory forever. This billboard and the accompanying concertina pocketbook are testimony not only to her astounding memory, but also her wide reaching network of friends and colleagues. Walls rips off the ARTSPACE logo in her cheeky 'art reference pocketbook'. 'STARSPACE PRESENTS ASTROLOGY Guide - What's your starsign sunshine?' 'Astrology *** Collections: VISITORS FROM THE ART WORLD'. Inside, or pasted on the BILLSPACE (which was, incidentally, named by Maria) are lists of names of art worldians. As in other recent works, Walls' project pulls the subject definitively into the social realm, but by using the BILLSPACE she flips the social democracy of the project. She claims the street space, which is under the nose of every passer-by, for the art world - and only for those who get it.
