Tuesday / Friday.

Tuesday, 2024
In eight thousand layers of moments
Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland
15 March – 11 May 2024

Friday, 2025
In ei numeroa
Finnish Museum of Technology, Helsinki
12 April – 1 June 2025

Tuesday and Friday examine Carless Days, the petrol-demand-reduction scheme introduced by the Third National Government during the 1979 oil crisis, which required vehicle owners to self-designate one day of the week on which they would not drive and to display a government-mandated sticker to that effect on their windshield. Those whose professions or circumstances required them to drive on their allotted day could apply for a temporary exemption sticker—and imitation stickers, produced on the black market, soon began to weaken the scheme, which ran from July 1979 until May 1980 and cut petrol consumption by an estimated 3.5%. Assembling the documentary traces of a short-lived and quietly circumvented piece of state policy, the work treats a moment of energy anxiety from the recent past as a mirror held up to the present.

The two works were made for a two-part exhibition exchange between doctoral students and alumni of Elam School of Fine Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki: Tuesday first in Auckland, then Friday at the Finnish Museum of Technology, where ei numeroa explored luck—chance, unpredictability, agency and control—through works set among the museum’s collection.

Materials (Tuesday): Archives New Zealand cardboard boxes, carbon-copy facsimile, 1975 MkII Ford Cortina windshield, vinyl sticker sheet, various sizes

Materials (Friday): Archives New Zealand cardboard boxes, carbon-copy facsimile, windshield (make, model and year unknown), vinyl sticker, rope, tennis ball, wooden pallet, various sizes