and documented performances have included actions such as sitting in the middle of a bustling market causing bodies to ebb and flow around him, standing at Auckland International Airport with a generic ‘welcome’ sign, or walking tightrope style down the middle of a busy road with cars passing by. Through their deceptive simplicity, Jeremy's works engage with complex histories and pose conflicting questions regarding societal order, global mobility and the precariousness of marginalised lives. While Jeremy's work has mostly involved video documented actions his practice is increasing becoming more varied to include collaborative events, interviews and photography. Works such as Dead Mileage (2011) and Queen Victoria (2013) reveal this diversity. For Dead Mileage Jeremy spent 24 hours transcribing on the pavement in chalk the names of East Street residents spanning a 100 year period. Existing strictly as a temporary event, this action emphasised the wildly shifting charter of Auckland's downtown across history and in real time.
Queen Victoria features Jeremy perched atop a ladder in direct gaze with the four Queen Victoria statues located in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. Here, relics of British imperialism in the form of cold inert figurative sculptures are confronted eye to eye with a colonised but resilient subject through the presence of the artist's warm and mortal body. These live, unannounced public performances now exist as a body of contextual material that is activated for exhibitions in a conversational capacity rather than as definitive documentation. Jeremy’s critical stance on the role of performance documentation has been integral to his practice and is constantly being revised. This, as curator Ioana Gordon-Smith emphasises, ‘underscores the contemporary as a moment of constant reconstruction’ and that ‘Queen Victoria points to a space between production and revision, where the desire to memorialise meets the legacy a memorial leaves in its wake.’
Jeremy has exhibited and presented collaborative projects throughout New Zealand at public art galleries and museums Auckland Art Gallery Toi o TaÌ„maki, Artspace, Gus Fisher Gallery, RM Gallery, ST PAUL St Gallery and Te Tuhi in Auckland; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Enjoy Gallery, 30 Upstairs Gallery and NgÄ Taonga Sound & Vision in Wellington; The Suter Art Gallery, Nelson. He has also been the recipient of awards such as Te Tuhi’s Iris Fisher Scholarship, 2009; The University of Auckland Post Graduate Scholarship, 2009 and Manukau School of Visual Arts Head of School Award, 2008.
