Scheduled Entertainment

Geoffrey Heath is well known for offering his vision of everyday life back to us for our contemplation. Often using suburbia as a backdrop, Heath’s unromanticised view of life is simultaneously humorous yet soberingly confrontational in its directness. Heath’s photographic images possess both a personal and universal appeal in his painstaking recreation of the everyday, and draw on the stockpile of memories and dreams, of personal experience and popular culture, that exist within us all.

Heath’s new works—like the exhibition title suggests—address a broad range of ritualistic leisure activities with a cynical yet humorous eye. These include Christmas, the office party, music lessons, the six o’clock news, infomercials, and our obsession with celebrity. From the banal to the startling and surreal, these images establish this artist’s unique viewpoint, and act as a penetrating memory trigger for a wide audience.

My intention is to create images that leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Images that are strongly resonant of everyday life, but like moments from a film, continue to stay with you, long after the final credits have rolled.

Geoffrey Heath lives and works in Auckland. In 2000 he graduated from Unitec School of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication Design. In 2004 he was the joint winner of the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award. He has exhibited in both solo and curated group exhibitions throughout New Zealand since the late 1990s and recently in Australia. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Floriferous; Flowers collected from the Sarjeant’s collection and beyond, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui (2010); From the Depths of Suburbia; Photo-media from Auckland, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Manukau and QCA Gallery, Griffith University, Queensland (2009); North Shore FX, City Art Rooms, Auckland and McNamara Gallery, Whanganui (2009); and Living Together, Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery, Wellington (2007/08). Heath is represented by Antoinette Godkin, Auckland and McNamara Gallery, Whanganui.

Additional support for Geoffrey Heath’s new works for this exhibition was generously granted to the artist by Creative New Zealand.