Flood-damaged Ponsonby house turned art installation
A collection of "anxious misfits" created by artist Simon Endres has taken up residence in a vacant Tawariki Street rental property this month.
When the Auckland Anniversary floods hit in 2023, stormwater and sewage inundated Tarawiki Street, where a row of houses now stand vacant, some in disrepair.
As a place with "a lot of hurt and trauma", Simon Endres says an unfurnished rental property on this street was an ideal setting for his new exhibition First Person (Hard-Boiled)- a collection of "very dark, but also very comic" life-size artworks created in response to the "terrible stuff" going on around the world.
"We're witnessing a live genocide every day. How do we pick ourselves up and put ourselves together? How do we deal with that stress, or the disconnect being made between truth and the rule of law and what is actually playing out in front of our eyes? … These works explore that," Endres tells Culture 101.
In 2020, after 21 years working with high-profile brands in the New York advertising industry, Endres moved back to Auckland with his family.
Although his health was "disastrous", the artist was also "jonesing" to start making artwork and started producing life-size figures with "lots of different emotions" packed into them.
To show these creations, Endres wanted a place that "had its own pathos".
A glimpse of one of Simon Endres' "anxious misfits".
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The houses of Tarawiki Street - which were built in the late 1930s on top of a stream that once ran into Cox's Bay - fit the bill.
Two years after floods ravaged houses on the street, that stream is now re-emerging, Endres says, and cutting a path through an overgrown lawn down to the culvert underneath the street.
At the launch of First Person (Hard-Boiled) a few weeks ago, neighbours were invited to connect and celebrate each other's resilience, he says, and a karakia was performed.
"You felt that weight lift, and it was a pretty powerful experience."
24 Tawariki Street - the site of Simon Endres' installation First Person (Hard-Boiled).
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After graduating from Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts decades ago, Endres said he didn't feel empowered to make art work "without compromise and without curatorial guardrails".
During his career as a New York advertising creative, though, he "never stopped thinking like an artist", and now seemed like the right time to get back into it.
This month, characters from the deepest corners of Endres' mind are making visitors to an unfurnished suburban house gasp and giggle.
"They are [my] alter egos, but my hope is that they translate and resonate with other people."
First Person (Hard-Boiled) is on at 24 Tawariki Street, Ponsonby until 27 September (Wednesday to Friday 11am – 6pm and Saturday & Sunday 10am – 3pm).
