…The same is true of an unusual work made by a collaboration called Yllwbro. A cross, crowned with a Don Binney-like painting of a bird, is formed by versions of the Māori division of the world into three realms and flanked by a closely printed framed myth about the discovery of fire and of honey. The insects, birds and trees involved in the myth act partly as in Māori lore and partly with European vocabulary such as “King of the Mountains”, or references to the riddle posed by Sampson in the Old Testament about honey and a lion. The myth itself is eloquent and complex in contrast to the bold simplicity of its setting.

TJ McNamara, Artspace functions at its best with richly varied show of new work (New Zealand Herald, 8 October, 2016)

Kōkako and Wētā, each with their own differently patterened flights, movements, habits, migratory routes. Each with their own particular inflections, their own expressivities deeply embedded, localised and connected to specific regions and ancestral grounds.

Anonymous duo ‘Yllwbro’ reclaim imagery of species indigenous to Aotearoa; beings so often lifted by culture industries and instrumentalised as signs of a stable national identity.

To tauparapara, to play, to collaborate can be a lively process involving ongoing negotiations in developing shared languages to imagine worlds in alliance with another. ‘Yllwbro’ make in partnership, using image making as a potent mechanism for rewriting, reclaiming and propagating new representations.

George Watson, New Perspectives, exhibition guide (Auckland: Artspace, 2016)

The focal point of the Brown Room in the narrow dealer gallery is a digital photograph of a sparrow (a nod to Michael Parekowhai) by A.A.M. Bos, which connects to the artist’s mother whose home-town in the Netherlands was so destroyed during WWII that not even sparrows were left. The colours of the sparrow are referenced in Yllwbro’s bird whare that hangs from the ceiling, providing a meeting place for conversation between Europeans and Māori. Stories of past conflict, family and messages of peaceful resolution are also evident in Yllwbro’s scallop shells with tā moko that allude to the incredible story of Tarore, who learned to read the Gospel of Luke in te reo Māori and whose murder led to peace, rather than further bloodshed.

It is difficult to sum up Wary – A Survey in so short a piece as this. The show is filled with the kinds of details and references that I have come to love in the work of Mokopōpaki artists: visual puns, humour, enigmatic and charismatic characters, Māori histories and perspectives, layered references to other artworks in the space, artists and personal histories. In particular, it is the artists’ interrogations of identity that continue to feel unique and necessary in the ways they seek to challenge the unfaltering status quo.

Eloise Callister-Baker, The Unmissables: Four Exhibitions to see in June (The Pantograph Punch, 1 June, 2018)

…So The Tomorrow People reached out to a range of collectives, independent galleries and artist-run spaces and the young artists working in them. Yllwbro, whose Flowers of the Field III (2017) featured in the show, is exemplary of the milieu. They are a brother and sister duo, working collaboratively and anonymously; they show at Mokopōpaki on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, best known already perhaps for the absence of white walls, but also for work drawing on Māori themes, with a hint of outsider aesthetic. Flowers of the Field is packed with personal, pop culture and Māori iconography, and seems a baroque riposte to the empty purity of the stereotypical contemporary gallery. In some ways its spirit is that of the show as a whole: busy, witty, indigenous and referential.

Tim Corballis, On Being Young: The Tomorrow People at the Adam (Auckland: Art New Zealand, No. 165, Autumn 2018), pp. 76–80

This is the second Billy Apple® show in Mokopōpaki’s Brown Room, one that came about when Jacob Raniera, the front person for Mokopōpaki, organised a conversation (via email) between the art entity Yllwbro (whom he represents) and Apple®. This involved looking at two paintings designed to present a newly minted Māori identity, te reo versions of the artist’s English Christian name, surname and registered logo; a second painting (on the right) responding to the first painting (on the left). With this statement and response format, it had affinities with the first exhibition.

Yllwbro rejected the idea of a simple Māori correlation/translation of ‘Billy Apple’ such as ‘Piri Āporo’. It was too obvious, too predictable-especially the ‘Āporo.’ The surname’s chosen replacement—‘Poho’—mirrors ‘Piri’ by way of starting with a ‘p’, and having one letter used twice that flanks the third letter on both sides.

‘Piri’ as a te reo ‘Billy’ also means (when a verb) to adhere or cling, while the juxtaposed ‘poho’ as a single word means chest, bosom or seat of affections. Attached to ‘piri’, the new word ‘piripoho’ means precious or treasured. It can also mean maternal love, referring to breastfeeding and parental bodily proximity.

The chosen colours are extremely important too—beyond their formal beauty and subtle softness. The brown of the gallery walls and background fields of the two canvases is obvious in its political significance, while the white of the letters in both paintings and the field surrounding the apple shape is not starkwhite but bone, a super pale—slightly warm and brown—gray. The te reo word for that colour is ‘iwi’ which of course means tribe and a particular collective community identity. Note also that in the doorway is a piece of nailed up Thar bone that Jacob, early on in the gallery’s history, installed as his own kind of mezuzah, a Jewish container for a tightly scrolled sacred text. Another unexpected resonance.

Of interest also are the two fonts, nuanced branding devices which Mokopōpaki and Apple® have swapped over in the two canvases so that sans serif Futura is on the right and tilted-seriffed Phinney Jenson on the left. The sense of togetherness or clinging between the two is accentuated.

With all this semantic layering you do wonder if the project is being a little over-determined, too controlled, too densely articulated, too obsessed with adding on meaning—and if the paintings can develop a life of their own, collaborating osmotically with the viewer, not the artists. Yet the bodily experience in the immersive brown space, with the occasional bone coloured field, is viscerally rewarding. Tertiary mixtures like dark brown are unusual for gallery or domestic walls. As part of a narrow space, they provide pleasantly strange sensations to walk into.

In the outer Grey Room, there are works by Apple®, Yllwbro and PĀNiA!. The Apple® study for a national flag uses tonal values to correlate Māori population statistics (via a percentage) with the national figures. Yllwbro focuses on the room next door, lining up a suspended Granny Smith apple—hanging from a brown string-with the brown Apple® logo as sort of target, and nodding to PĀNiA!’s toy horticultural tractor—placed near the Brown Room—on which the affectionate term ‘Piripoho’ is painted. Yllwbro also has a canvas wedge (painted brown) on the wall pointedly opposite the Apple® flag. Its tapered cross-section alludes to Māori population increases, the inevitable gaining of political power, and the eroding of Eurocentric hegemony within Aotearoa.

Two rooms: Grey and Brown: fierce and friendly—shrewdly juxtaposed.

John Hurrell, Cultural Transmutation (EyeContact, 26 July, 2018)