Roger Boyce: Painter Speaks

This exhibition is now closed

Grinning ventriloquist dummies are the stars of the show in Roger Boyce's Painter Speaks.

Christchurch painter Roger Boyce is an affectionate satirist of the art of painting, sending up its conventions even as he revels in them. Here he takes on Marcel Duchamp's old complaint that painters are stupid or 'dumb' – more concerned with the physical work of making than with the lofty work of thinking and speaking. The stars of his send-up are two ventriloquist's dummies, which float free of any puppeteer in front of poster-bright landscapes. The dummies are, Boyce says, 'a sort of stand-in for the painted object itself. The object has no volition or voice excepting that of the fellow who is – so to speak – elbow deep up the dummy's backside.'