Lunch Dates
A love letter to the dirtiest doves.

Curatorial Response, Happily Ever Pigeon by Minsoh Choi

Over the past few years, I’ve been documenting my everyday encounters with pigeons and
seagulls. Nesting and persisting in an environment so indifferent to their presence.
These birds tend to join us at the end of our lunch dates. I once looked past them, wary of
whatever they might carry. To look at these birds so lovingly is bound to my other half. He holds
out his hands to feed them, to pet them, to find something familiar in them.
Watching them together, I began to notice more: the way these city birds move, compete, adapt,
and survive with whatever they’re given. I could only sympathise and admire. These paintings
come from those moments.

Artist Bio
Daniella Bay is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. A graduate of Elam School
of Fine Arts, her practice spans painting, large-scale installations, curation and collective
organising. She is a founding member of The Killing, an artist collective known for experimental
exhibitions and collaborative approaches to making.
Bay’s work often explores iconography and urban life through a shifting visual language that
moves between abstraction and representation. While previous projects have taken the form of
installation, zines, and performance, her recent paintings engage more directly with traditional
genres through observational documentation. Her palette is saturated and idealised, pushing
against realism to frame the everyday as both staged and strange.
Lunch Dates marks Bay’s first solo exhibition.