The Brood traces a dark sensibility in recent art from Aotearoa New Zealand. Across nine new commissions, some of the most interesting young(ish) artists in the country have been invited to unleash their inner demons into the art gallery: Iann An, Grace Crothall, Harry Culy, Wesley John Fourie, Cassie Freeth, Brad Logan Heappey, Theo MacDonald, Nathan Taare, and the first collaborative work made by mother-and-daughter duo Tia and Ming Ranginui. These artists are positioned as the dark progeny of the ‘New Zealand gothic’ tradition—a new generation of brooding, gothy children who both revere and rebel against its creaky tropes.
The exhibition borrows its title from David Cronenberg’s 1979 psychological body horror The Brood. Cronenberg’s cult film tells the story of a mother in the middle of a nasty custody battle, who undergoes an experimental ‘psychoplasmic’ therapy that causes her to give birth to monstrous offspring hell-bent on vengeance. The artworks in this exhibition were not made in direct response to this film. The Brood appears instead as a metaphor for the way that artists release their monstrous ideas and impulses into the world.
The Brood has been curated by Curator of Screams, an ongoing collaboration between Chelsea Nichols (Senior Curator, The Dowse Art Museum) and Aaron Lister (Senior Curator, City Gallery Wellington) which seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary art and horror films. For generations, it has been a rite of passage for angsty teenagers to gather with their broody friends and watch scary movies. This exhibition seeks to bring some of that energy into the experience of looking at art. After all, horror has never just been about entertainment. Something important is happening in those dark aisles of the cinema, as these young viewers test the boundaries of their beliefs, their fears, their sexuality, their morality and themselves. We figure out where we fit into society by peering into its shadows.
Movie references can be spotted throughout the exhibition, from the demonic dog of Cujo (1983) to Buffalo Bill’s dance from The Silence of the Lambs (1991). However, horror is conjured most powerfully through these artists’ psychological explorations of family, place and memory—in the carpet tiles of a cultish Pentecostal church, the acrid smells of a haunted house, or the suburban disquiet of Vampire Grove.
Theo MacDonald
Cujo (1983, dir. Lewis Teague) is a tense and claustrophobic horror film based on a Stephen King novel. A mother and her young son are trapped inside a car at the mercy of rabid Saint Bernard, as the blazing sun threatens them with heatstroke. This is a horror of the everyday. The monster is not supernatural or demonic—it is a beloved family pet turned feral and nightmarish.
Like the protagonists in Cujo, Theo Macdonald and his partner just wanted to get home safely, but a dog stood in the way. They were attempting to return to Aotearoa during the COVID-19 pandemic, but due to the country’s biosecurity regulations their beloved pup Jerry had to be left behind to undergo strict quarantine procedures. This included elaborate blood testing to measure the effectiveness of his rabies vaccine, to protect Aotearoa’s rabies free status.
As an artist interested in frameworks of nationhood, border politics and horror movies, Macdonald began making a work that melded these real and fictional events. The spinning motion of the car references the innovative cinematography of the original Cujo film, which included a spinning camera, a ‘snorkel’ lens and an actor in a dog suit. Macdonald’s DIY version traps them all in a perpetual loop, referencing the circular logic of fear, biosecurity as conceptual border, and the unending nightmare of bureaucracy.
Shot on Super 8mm film like an old home movie, Macdonald’s work picks up where Stephen King left off. The film softened the original ending of the novel, where the child dies despite his mother’s heroic efforts. Through the motif of the family pet, Cujo 2 can be seen as a meditation on how nations manage fear of things both real and imagined.
Wesley John Fourie
In one of the most memorable scenes from the 1991 horror/thriller The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme), deranged serial killer Buffalo Bill dances in front of a mirror, resplendent in a colourful kimono and lipstick. As his victim attempts to escape from a dark pit in the basement, Buffalo Bill immerses himself in fantasies of his own sexual desirability and gender metamorphosis. Set to the dark synth pop beat of ‘Goodbye Horses’ by Q Lazzarus, Buffalo Bill is terrifying, pathetic and fabulous all at once.
Wesley John Fourie’s series HYPERBALLAD channels a similar combination of creepy intensity, emotional vulnerability, and queer self-expression. Part Tumblr-style confessional and part karaoke serenade, Fourie sings obsession-themed pop songs into objects found around their studio, while making unnerving eye contact with the camera. These performances reimagine the classical myth of Narcissus through contemporary internet culture. It is never clear whether we are supposed to applaud or be afraid of them.
For The Brood, Fourie was commissioned to add the song ‘Goodbye Horses’ to his HYPERBALLAD repertoire. Although Silence of the Lambs won dozens of awards, the film has also been widely condemned for its blatant transphobia, which conflates Buffalo Bill’s queerness with his monstrosity. For this project, Fourie got a nipple piercing and three tattoos—a cross, the word LOVE, and the rib of Adam—to match the ones worn by actor Ted Levine in his standout performance in the role of Buffalo Bill. At a political moment when queer and trans bodies are once again being cast as society’s bogeyman, Fourie’s re-enactment of this scene insists that these conversations remain alive.
Grace Crothall
In the 2024 psychological horror film Heretic (dir. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods), two young Morman missionaries get trapped inside the house of a seemingly mild-mannered man who lures them in with discussion of faith and the scent of blueberry pie. The tension grows as it becomes clearer and clearer that there are dark intentions lurking behind the pleasant domestic setting and Hugh Grant’s bumbling charisma. Eventually he forces them to choose between two doors marked ‘Belief’ and ‘Disbelief’…which both lead to the same locked cellar.
Artist Grace Crothall sets up an unintentionally parallel encounter with her work, offering two same-but-different entry points into her installation DREAMS! Visitors might find themselves on either side of a grey carpet-tiled stage, providing an awkward vantage point for four photo-realistic pastel drawings centred around Crothall’s upbringing in an evangelical Pentecostal church.
Based on her own found family photographs from the late 1990s to early 2000s, the drawings depict the artist and family friends in their everyday lives: reading a book, bathing a baby, visiting a stable, or performing in a Nativity play on a grey carpeted stage. With a Lynchian suburban romanticism, Crothall describes this body of work as being about “memory and childhood, and the feeling of watching something sacred drown.”
Uncanny and unsettling, DREAMS! examines the aesthetics of belief with an austere practicality that is disarming in its banality. In horror and art alike, religion is most often depicted as something baroque and sinister—awash with secretive cult rituals, sadistic robed figures, and ornately decorated cathedrals. But Crothall’s work underscores the bland, corporate functionality of belief institutions, whether it be the contemporary charismatic church or the art gallery. Real world horror is carpet-tiled, white walled and sometimes blueberry scented.
Iann An
David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) is a psychological body horror where repressed trauma and maternal rage manifest as murderous offspring who strike out against the world. In one of film’s most memorable representations of ‘the monstrous feminine’, the mother lifts her nightgown and bites into an exo-womb growing on her stomach. She takes out a small mutant foetus and licks it clean of its birthing gore, like a mother cat cleaning its kittens.
Iann An’s practice, too, presents a surprising combination of maternal tenderness and the abject body. Bed Marrow is formed around the idea of a mutant baby nursery, complete with soft toys and a dangling baby mobile. She “births” her fleshy and womb-like sculptures from a material base of bread dough, wax, animal hide, hair and other found materials which are transformed and reconstituted through an intensive process of assembling, layering, stitching, ripping, lathering, patching, painting, kneading and congealing. Her hatchlings are left to age, mould and decay, in ways that speak to the vulnerability and animalistic glories of the body.
Disgust is a key force in Iann An’s practice: “It guides and fertilises me.” And yet, the sensation of pure revulsion is corrupted with moments of nurture and affection. Stuffed animals, while mutated into monstrous forms, speak to childhood comforts from the things that go bump in the night. Pink hearts adorn a corpulent form with protruding nipples, that awkward stage between childhood and sexual maturity. At the centre, a gory heart pulsates.
Her practice meditates on the entanglements of life and death, dangling the viewer between the forces of attraction and repulsion, permanence and change, purity and impurity, sacred and profane. On the surface, her sculptures look like something only a mother could love. But perhaps that’s exactly the point.
Nathan Taare (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Tama)
A haunting always happens in the imagination first. In the psychological horror film The Others (dir. Alejando Amenábar, 2001), a widow and her two children experience supernatural phenomena in their secluded manor home in the Channel Islands. With a growing sense of dread, they hear sounds, see movements and sense presences that they can’t explain, leading them to the belief that the house is haunted.
Working as a production designer on films like Grafted (2024), artist Nathan Taare has plenty of experience in creating the sensation of horror through visual effects. His real fascination, however, is in the possibilities of smell. Outside of his film work, Taare runs OF BODY, an experimental perfume laboratory in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington where he explores the intangible reverberations of scent as a form of artistic expression.
For Olfactory Ghost, Taare invites visitors to imagine an encounter with the spirit world within the darkened gallery space. Using notes like damp soil, blood accords, wet fur, or your grandmother’s perfume, Taare pairs timed scent diffusers with sonic elements to take you on a journey to the darkest places of your mind. Collaborating with sound designer Thomas Lambert, the pair took direct inspiration from David Cronenberg’s The Brood, abstracting the film’s audio track into a darkly distorted soundscape that reverberates through your bones.
The twist in The Others [spoiler alert!] is that the widow and her children are not sensing ghosts; they themselves are the ghosts who are sensing the living occupants of the house. Taare’s work likewise asks us to question the conclusions we draw from our sensory perceptions.
Cassie Freeth
Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) was the first film version of Mary Shelley’s seminal horror novel. Boris Karloff plays ‘the monster,’ assembled from multiple body parts and then abandoned by his creator—left alone to wander the woods misunderstood, shunned and hunted. This was always a queer monster. The film and the novel both have queer makers, and what once might have read like hidden subtext now screams loudly from the film.
Cassie Freeth’s Manticore is a contemporary exploration of such monstrous queer energies and sadomasochistic obliteration. Here hangs the exoskeleton of her creature, made and worn by Freeth during a performance staged on opening night of the exhibition. The performance was a symbiotic dance between creature and creator, human and non-human, sub and dom. The point where Freeth ends and Manticore begins is often hard to discern—but it is likely held together with a cable tie.
Like Frankenstein, Manticore is continually resurrected in an ever-evolving series, in which Freeth’s creature is made and unmade, broken up and brought back to life through a process of collage which embraces failure, chance and destruction. This is an act of becoming, which mirrors the construction and embodiment of queer identity and the trans body.
Tia Ranginui (Ngāti Hine Oneone)
Ming Ranginui (Te Ati Haunui-a-Pāpārangi)
Jordan Peele has revitalised the horror genre with genre-bending films that cleverly subvert classic horror tropes with incisive racial and social commentary. His 2022 film NOPE, for example, is on the surface a UFO invasion film set on a western ranch but reveals itself to be critique of capitalist spectacle and exploitation.
Like the family in Nope, mother and daughter Tia and Ming Ranginui have come together to fight another manifestation of this monster. Their atmospheric horror short, Minimum Wage, is set in Mellonsfolly Ranch—a faux American Old West town built in 2006 by a wealthy businessman in the middle of the Manawatū-Whanganui region. This bizarre out-of-time, out-of-place ranch is stalked by the invisible invader of Capitalism. After all, it is a place purely created for a millionaire and his paying guests to play out their fantasies, however depraved.
Tia and Ming’s main character is a wind-up doll who performs and dances without any real autonomy. However, the work hints toward a classic horror movie revenge/redemption arc, where the plaything becomes player.
Set to the dark musical energies of Whanganui-based BIRDPARTY, Minimum Wage is the first official collaboration of the mother-and-daughter duo, and their first venture into moving image. While normally working in different mediums, both grapple with the legacy of colonial and capitalist invaders in their separate practices, in part by subverting the visual language and symbols of Gothic colonialism.
Brad Logan Heappey
Jaws (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg) made a whole generation of audiences afraid to go in the water. The shark, however, is a surprising villain—a totally neutral predator, neither good nor evil. But perhaps it is precisely the lack of good or bad intentions that makes it so scary.
Brad Logan Heappey conjures up the creatures of our time. These are monsters conceived through doom scrolling and gestated in the digital swamp of our contemporary existence. We live in a world where an algorithm might serve you up the most horrific images of humanitarian crises, followed ten seconds later by a video of adorable kittens. This dramatically shapes the way we see and feel about the world, but the algorithm is neither inherently good nor evil; it is a shark-like predator designed only with the intention to keep you looking at a screen.
Heappey’s 3D-printed sculptures draw from found objects and imagery, brooding on cultural narratives of suffering both past and present. A wall drawing made of brightly-coloured pills, for example, references the Alexamenos graffito—a piece of Roman graffiti from around the year 200 AD that mocks a crucified, donkey-headed Christ. Heappey calls this the perfect archetype of getting kicked while you’re down.
Like the Faustian baby trapped in a cage, Heappey’s sculptures contemplate the bargains with the devil that we must strike to survive in contemporary world. How do we cope? We cry. Pop pills. Jerk off. Make art. Watch horror movies.
Harry Culy
Ginger Snaps (2001, dir. John Fawcett) starts with the gothy teenage Fitzgerald sisters on a photography assignment. They stage death scenes in their house and backyard, reimagining the cookie-cutter suburban experience which has no place for freaks like them. They soon discover that there are monsters to be found in that neighbourhood, in their changing bodies and desires. It’s a coming-of-age horror, replete with scenes of bloody werewolves and bloodier periods.
Welcome to Vampire Grove. Harry Culy’s large format black and white photographs map out a psychological space where familiar suburban sites are transformed into an uncanny landscape of dark dreams and even darker desires. Culy’s vacant landscapes and stark portraits use a kind of dream logic that picks apart rather than documents the realities of suburban Aotearoa. He opens up a whole other world of narratives and imaginative possibilities that exist beyond what we can merely see. His photographs suggest an imagined gothic utopia where, perhaps, the artists of The Brood would thrive.
An ardent horror fan, Culy’s photographs are imbued with the everyday strangeness of Diane Arbus’s photographs, or the atmospheric films of Robert Eggers. But his artistic origin story comes from his own dark psyche: a recurring nightmare where he is attacked by zombies. In the dream, Culy struggles not to survive but to keep taking photographs even though there will likely be no humans left to see them. This horror-fuelled compulsion has led Culy—and now all of us—to Vampire Grove.
AARON LISTER 