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Artists announced for RISE exhibition at Canterbury Museum

Friday 6 December 2013, 2:00PM

By Canterbury Museum

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CHRISTCHURCH

Canterbury Museum has today announced the major artists who will feature their artwork in the summer blockbuster exhibition, RISE.

The international artists include ROA, Anthony Lister, Thom Buchanan, Beastman and Ian ‘Kid Zoom’ Strange, while the New Zealand lineup consists of Askew 1, Eno, BMD, Ghǿstie aka Sean Duffell, Yikes, Wongi and Ikarus.

Adelaide artist, Thom Buchanan, who has an Honours Degree in Fine Arts and teaches painting and drawing at the University of South Australia, is excited to be creating an artwork for the exhibition. He began creating the ‘streetscape’ in the Museum’s Special Exhibition Hall on Monday.

“This is a beautiful space to be working in especially seeing the transition from historical displays to contemporary art,” he says. “Meeting Wongi and the local guys has also been great. Watching them create the evolution of street art in the same space, through layers of paint which each tell their own story, is fantastic.”

Buchanan, who specializes in two-dimensional painting and portraiture, as well as video and in-situ performance art, has spent 15 years in the industry and is looking forward to setting the scene for RISE which opens at the Museum on 20 December.

“This amazing space is bringing every form of graffiti and street art together and blending it in within a backdrop – one of the largest streetscapes I’ve ever produced,” he says. I’ve been envisaging street artists painting over the top of my work for a few years and RISE has offered me the opportunity – it’s sensational!”

The artwork, which the public can view being developed now, will take approximately two weeks to complete and is just one of many stunning murals to be created in the Museum’s exhibition galleries for the RISE exhibition.

“My aim is to create a work that people here can relate to, one that draws on Christchurch pre-quake but also may plant a seed of thought for the rebuild.”

For more information on RISE and the artists mentioned above, visit www.oiyou.co.nz