Stella Brennan
Stella Brennan is a New Zealand artist, curator, and essayist.Background
Brennan was born in 1974, in Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated from the University of Auckland with an MFA in 1999. She currently lives in Auckland.Career
Brennan is a mixed media installation artist. She utilises a variety of materials including found objects, video projection, and sculpture. Her work explores concepts of space and time between individuals and address issues such as industrialisation, colonialism, and technology.
Brennan has published as an art critic and appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, the New Zealand Listener and Art New Zealand. She has also worked as an essayist for artists Patricia Piccinini and Ann Veronica Janssens.
In 2001 Brennan was the artist in residence at Artspace Sydney and in 2004 she was the inaugural Digital Artist in Residence at the Department of Screen and Media Studies at University of Waikato. In 2007 she received a fellowship at Apex Arts in New York.
Brennan is a co-founder of Aotearoa Digital Arts and was co-editor, with Su Ballard, for the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader.
In 2006 she was a finalist for the Walters Prize, with her installation Wet Social Sculpture, first shown at St Paul St Gallery, Auckland.
Work by Brennan is held in the collection of the Chartwell Collection in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Brennan is represented by Trish Clark Gallery.Exhibitions
Brennan has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe.
- 2002 Another Green World, Artspace, Sydney
- 2004 Tommorw Never Knows, The Physics Room, Christchurch
- 2005 Memory Hole, Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland
- 2006 Envoy from Mirror City and No Stairway, Starkwhite, Auckland
- 2007 No More Gaps, Starkwhite, Auckland
- 2008 South Pacific, Two Rooms, Auckland
- 2008 Second Child, Starkwhite, Auckland
- 2009 The Middle Landscape, Starkwhite, Auckland
- 2012 every room i have ever been in, Audio Foundation, Auckland
- 2015 Truth + Fiction, Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland
- 2016 Black Flags, Trish Clark Gallery, Auckland
Curated exhibitions
- 1999 Nostalgia for the Future, Artspace NZ, Auckland
- 2002–2003 Dirty Pixels, Artspace NZ, Adam Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Waikato Museum of Art and History
- 2008 Cloudland: Digital Art from Aotearoa New Zealand, The Substation, Singapore, co-currator