Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington

Merylyn Tweedie is a New Zealand multimedia artist. In 2004 she won the Walters Prize, New Zealand's highest award for contemporary art, and in 2003 her work was selected to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. Merylyn Tweedie was born in Christchurch in 1953. She began exhibiting in 1975, initially creating and exhibiting photographs, before moving on to collage, found objects and film. In 1992 Tweedie joined seven other artists (Kirsty Cameron, Judy Darragh, Gail Haffern, Giovanni Intra, Denise Kum, Lucy Macdonald and Daniel Malone) to open an artist-owned exhibition space in Vulcan Lane, Auckland, known as Teststrip, which ran until 1997. The work selected for the 2003 Venice Biennale was created under the pseudonym et al, which presents itself as a collective of artists led by Tweedie, but is in fact Tweedie herself. The installation, understood as a fundamental practice, uses sound, computers and mechanical devices and was designed to question the way people consume information and the power structures of the media in our societies. The selection of et al. to represent New Zealand caused some controversy in the country as misinformation about the artist's identity, income and use of public funds circulated in the media, but the installation was praised by international art critics. Tweedie's work is in the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Christchurch Art Gallery and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.