The Brood

Artworks can sometimes operate like wayward, feral children left to run amok in the world. Marianna Simnett once described her role as an artist as “a f*cked up mom, projecting my perversions onto an innocent flock. It gives me great joy to think of my little demons out there, wandering the world, knocking out anyone who gets in the way.”

The Brood traces a dark sensibility in recent art from Aotearoa. The exhibition features nine new commissions from some of the most interesting little demons on the scene today: 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 mentally ill mother in the midst of a custody battle, who undergoes an experimental ‘psychoplasmic’ treatment that causes her to give birth to monstrous little rage babies that wreak havoc on her behalf. The artworks in this exhibition were not made in direct response to this film, instead approaching The Brood as a metaphor for the way that artists release their monstrous ideas and impulses into the world.

The Brood is 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. Indeed, 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) to the pram on the iconic posters for Rosemary’s Baby (1968). However, horror is conjured most powerfully through these artists’ psychological exploration of family, place and memory—in the carpet tiles of a Pentecostal church, the acrid smells of a haunted house, or the suburban disquiet of Vampire Grove.

^{Film still from The Brood (1979), dir. David Cronenberg.}