Understudy
Lewis Vivian Cosgrave and Elijah Molloy-Wolt
30/01/2025 - 22/01/2025
Curated by Jamie RH
Understudy invites us to reflect on a role shaped by its own waiting. On the periphery, it suggests an unsettling sense of unrealised potential, an ambivalence, or even a quiet tension. Lewis Vivian Cosgrave and Elijah Molloy-Wolt present a new body of work that engages with the understudy within visual culture, examining how the image is shaped by both presence and absence within their respective practices.
Molloy-Wolt explores the spectral possession of objects, drawing on folk histories to create a doppelganger of material culture, objects that exist outside of historical or geographical context—unfolding instead in the timelessness of a haunted present. Concurrently, Cosgrave approaches the personal archive with a gentle distortion, layering abstracted mark-making to obscure the image's subject while revealing the hidden, often contradictory flows of desire woven through our everyday lives.
Lewis Vivian Cosgrave (Ngāti Pūkenga, b.1997) is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artist primarily focused on painting and drawing practices. In their work personal narratives are often obscured in order to give primacy to the introspective viewer. This intentional reticence is achieved through the alteration of collected imagery and delicate use of colour. Emphasis is placed on experiences of the quotidian – the small, often trivial moments that, despite their mundanity and transience, provide us with space to reflect upon the everyday, its feeling and meaning.
Lewis Vivian Cosgrave graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from Massey University in 2024. Recent exhibitions include; Cloudspotting (Play_station, 2022), Wellington City (Envy6011, offsite, 2023), Coil (offsite, 2023), Community (Envy6011, 2023).
Elijah Molloy-Wolt (b. 2001) is an Ōtautahi/Kerikeri-based artist whose practice focuses on documenting everyday objects made outside of intellectual theory—recontextualising their roles in present space-time. Drawn to wood discards and using found materials—to assemble objects that pose as discarded talismans, toys and shrines.
Elijah Molloy-Wolt graduated from the University of Canterbury in 2023 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in sculpture. Recent exhibitions include Song of Solomon; A Response to Ralph Hotere and Cilla McQueen (Satellite2, 2024) and You can see an end in the fields, and I was about as muddy as I'd ever been, should it be that I leave this place then I would (Ilam Campus Gallery, 2023).
Poster design by Harris Wilson
Install documentation by Belinda Whitta
