CHIMP responds to the housing crisis through art exhibition Escape Mechanism.
Contemporary artist CHIMP takes his frustration out on the housing crisis through his latest exhibition Escape Mechanism.
CHIMP, known to friends and family as 26-year-old Ash Sisson, never imagined it would be so hard to buy his first home.
He said after countless late nights in 2020 scouring listings and watching rejections pile up, he channelled his disappointment into his largest solo exhibition.
"[The disappointment] helped motivate the exhibition and the body of work I've produced to represent that," he said.
Escape Mechanism will exhibit at Limn Gallery in Ponsonby, Auckland, where the crisis began.
After saving eight years worth of income from large murals, paintings and design jobs for corporate clients, he felt confident he could afford a deposit on his first home.
In the past year, the average asking price for Wairarapa housing has increased by 10.4 per cent, from $721,410 to $816,080.
At first he wanted to buy a property in Wellington, but with central city prices skyrocketing he next held high hopes for Wairarapa, closer to his parents' home in Parkvale, near Carterton.
"I wanted to find something that I could get onto the property ladder with to get started, something I could do up and eventually move on from just a starting block," CHIMP said.
Contemporary artist CHIMP.
"But there's basically no beginning step anymore.
"The cheapest properties you can find are apartments, which you can't do anything to.
"I suppose I thought Wairarapa would have more worn-down, older buildings that one could get for a reasonable price and work your way up the ladder.
"That gap has been removed from this housing crisis, and that's going to have pretty significant ramifications further down the line as more and more generations go off and want to purchase their own home."
CHIMP's family lives in a tiny home in Parkvale while they navigate the trials and tribulations of building a home.
"It's not just that the housing crisis has brought property prices up," he said.
"It's that Covid, and the freight issues that have stemmed from that, have caused massive supply chain issues in every industry, but particularly in the building industry.
"So building a house is getting more expensive, harder to secure materials for, which is just further adding to the problem.
"It's sort of a perfect storm in a lot of ways.
"We've got supply issues, demand issues.
"Can't build more. Can't get more."
Escape Mechanism will feature 10 paintings, three poems and CHIMP's first exhibited sculpture called Makeshift, built from found materials cut using a computer numerical control (CNC) machine.
Makeshift is a sculpture produced as a "mock solution" for the housing crisis, he said.
"It's basically a blunt statement that if we don't sort this out, or figure out a way around it or change our ways, we will have to make our own little shacks.
"Whether they're tiny homes or just homeless shelters."
The exhibition at Limn Gallery has been a long time coming, he said.
"I've been chipping away at these pieces for about two years.
"When I first started bringing architecture into my work, it was a fairly new subject matter to me.
"This is the first body of work I've produced focusing on architecture or buildings, without birds or portraits, which are my usual staples.
"The processes involve designing on Photoshop, Illustrator, printing those, looking at them in real life, painting samples, making lots of concepts, going back to the design process on the computer, and then building up texture."
Although CHIMP couldn't secure a house in Wairarapa yet, when he's not painting he finds inspiration from the Wairarapa coast.
He hopes his art will show people they're not alone
"I suppose it's a frame of reference, for other people to see how other humans are interacting and seeing the world.
"And it's a way to potentially relate to or completely disagree with others, because you get a lot out of both.
