March 2 - April 2, 2023 Year of the Rabbit

This month’s exhibition brings together the works of 10 artists in response to the theme RABBIT.

The Chinese New Year kicks off from January to mid-February and this year, 2023, is the Year of the Rabbit, standing as a symbol of longevity, peace and prosperity.

But Dibble’s rabbit is anything but gentle, holding us hostage with a rifle.

Dibble has been interested in rabbits for quite a time. He is fascinated with the odd relationship New Zealanders have with rabbits. On the one hand they are described in folklore as loveable creatures – the storybook Peter Rabbit who cheekily stole lettuces from Mr. McGregor’s garden or the portrayals of the Easter Bunny that delivers chocolate to children – cute, fluffy, and harmless. But rabbits are one of the earliest realized villains in environmental damage, affecting farmers by causing devastation to grazing fields. Dibble has memories of the problems on the farm when he was growing up “… rabbits were considered a threat to the community, we use to go and round up the cows and see how many rabbits we could shoot as we went – there were hundreds of the bastards”.

Controversial remedies like the spread of the calicivirus in the 1990s (where, in an act of home-grown biological terrorism, illicit production and distribution of the virus occurred before it was legalised) interested Dibble and in these years he produced his first artworks concerning rabbits. Previously they had made the odd appearance, most as small witnesses, posed beside incongruous elements like seashells and mermaids. Of the Calici rabbit series one artwork featuring three dancing rabbits, cynically titled The Hills are Alive, 2002 (from the Julie Andrews song line), perfectly illustrated the sugar sweet versus evil dichotomy of the animal in the New Zealand landscape.

Rabbits appeared again in Dibble’s work around 2014, and they keep springing up again every few years with new additional models. The rabbit depictions are always smug and self-satisfied, previous rabbits have leaned on stumps or strutted with an upright confident gait, some have played the ukulele, or the flute and one was posed next to a fish it had caught. But the greatest number have procured the farmer’s gun, ready to turn-the-tables.

This gigantic Rabbit Fights Back at 2.1 metres is from 2015.