08/09/2026
Angels Bought Me Here
Aria McInnes
12.09.26 - 02.10.26
Opening Friday 11th September at 5:30pm
In Angels Bought Me Here, Aria McInnes creates a place where the mundane business of buying groceries meets the promise that, perhaps, something better is waiting just around the corner.
A particular consumer optimism abounded in early-2000s New Zealand commercial culture, from reality TV talent shows to the luxurious lifestyle branding of weekly magazines. Today’s supermarket claims to remain a homebase for this optimism, offering a whole “New World” of promise, possibility and positive transformation, delivered through the everyday act of shopping.
Taking this claim to its logical conclusion, McInnes remixes the present-day duopoly through the arrangement of props, sculpture and video, turning the supermarket into a stage of its own. From entry to exit, customers circulate, finding absolution and salvation in the acquisition of essential goods.
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Aria McInnes is an artist and retailer whose installation-based practice examines the staging of sincerity across personal and public spheres, as mediated by consumer culture. Often drawing from the performative logics of reality television, telemarketing, and retail environments, her work explores the tensions between moral intent and commercial participation—particularly within service roles, where one is at once “in service” and “being served.” Through parody and theatrical exaggeration, her work embraces the ridiculousness of these contradictions, offering humour as both a coping mechanism and a critical tool for navigating the moral ambiguities of participating in the very systems it seeks to question.
She holds a BFA (Hons) from Massey University’s College of Creative Arts and an MFA from Auckland University of Technology.
Poster design by Hawi sn tail
Sponsored by Parrotdog
Sponsored by The Puffin
With support from Creative New Zealand
