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.
The Brood
Curated with Dr Chelsea Nichols
The Dowse Art Museum
15 February—22 June 2025
AARON LISTER 