On the 31st of October "Spaceships of the Mind", a dynamic new series of paintings by Wellington based artist and musician Stephen Clover, will appear at the Gallery on Riddiford in Newtown. The basic premise behind the series, which came to Clover while he was experiencing hallucinations during the fevered delirium of a bout of influenza, explores themes common in contemporary art; but rather than employ fashionable po-faced revisionism he has chosen to attempt discourse using a collection of imaginative sci-fi scenarios.

These exciting paintings incorporate bold, energetic visual themes with a number of inter-related topics surrounding the history of imperial, colonial and corporate culture, exploitation of indigenous people and resources, militarism and the sciences of the future (biotechnology, genetic engineering etc.) The works parade a cautionary future-shock fable couched in the language of comedic allegory and coloured with Clover's customary wilfully obscure and playful humour. References are made to more esoteric subjects surrounding the construction of new theologies in mass-culture, and the secret and jealously-guarded power-base of scientific and technological knowledge. He also explores contemporary re-readings of ancient scripts, crop circles, alien abductions and cattle mutilation with ambiguity and satire.

The accidental and unintentional humour present within his works, considered by Clover to be crucial to the presentation of his ideas, is achieved largely through the (seemingly) random combinations of images and texts, juxtapositions usually the result of spontaneous free association. In "Spaceships of the Mind" he has attempted to further channel and refine his accumulative process by semi-consciously filtering and selecting from texts encountered only during the actual execution of the paintings.

In order to see past the pessimism and apathy of the age, Clover is suggesting that we disarm the apparent inevitability of the history of the near-future by making jokes about it and distracting it with surrealist nonsense.