Mark Leonard and Tobias Kraus comment on the

Judy Millar debate.

Philately rollercoaster

Lianne Edwards: 2nd nature
Antoinette Godkin
3 November - 29 November 2009

Lianne Edwards is known for her meticulously assembled, floating grids of repeated used-stamp sections, hovering in mid air like the paper birds or butterflies she takes them from. Her practice has lots of similarities to Peter Madden’s except he uses magazine pages not stamps, likes to create sculpture with real depth, and fabricates even denser clusters of imagery. He is not interested in rigorously gridded order like Edwards with her shallow space, being more prone to chaotic forms motivated by global eco-politics.

Using Madden as a foil for discussion is useful because it makes us more aware of Edwards’ attraction to old used stamps, and what they contribute. Their colour for example, in conjunction with the white behind them, is delicate and restrained. Dark tones are rare – unlike say photos in magazines.

Edwards seems to be moving away from rectangular formations, and exploring other varieties of collage composition. Often she creates linear looping, figure-of-eight formations, or spirals or vortices. Each time with one motif relentlessly repeated obsessively.

Though the artist comes from a family of philately enthusiasts, it could be argued that she is a vandal cutting out sections of so many identical images - for the sake of Art. Yet in her variety of regimented organisation Edwards is moving the fauna of these stamps towards an interesting purpose, especially when inventing new compositional formats. In her art the stamps work best when they create a new counter-image that dominates over the initial tiny document. It transcends the material’s original context.

Some of these ‘stamp fields’ also create optical after-images, strange patterns of shape edge that materialise and then disappear in conjunction with the bright gallery light on the walls behind them. The white walls tend also to bleach the saturated stamp colour. The works operate as a form of op art.

Edwards I think is one of those artists who works by tinkering with an object or item, playing with it as a raw material (singly or in groups) to see what imaginative possibilities turn up; by mentally locking onto an item (perhaps by fetishising it by severing it from its function) and analysing its properties to discover new forms or meanings. Most artists in fact do it. They don’t start off with an idea or concept, they start by exploring a material or substance to see where it leads them.

Edwards’ challenge is to move away from the easily identifiable stamp grid, and to introduce further wit, like Michel Tuffery did a few years ago with his yellow bull made from corned beef cans. To let the newly created form take over to give the recycled raw material new life.

David Cauchi and Hugh Charse on naming policy

Also Giovanni Tiso and Justin Jade Morgan.

Bambury at Jensen

Stephen Bambury: the painting is at the wall
Jensen
14 October - 18 December 2009

Most Auckland gallery goers probably won’t be particularly surprised if I tell them that right now on the walls of the large downstairs space at Jensen, under natural light, are seven carefully positioned Bambury paintings, and while three others of paint and wax on stone tiles are also present in a flat vitrine, the seven panelled works make up an unusually absorbing installation. Jensen Gallery often has spare, somewhat austere, elegant hangs.

However it is not just the exactitude of their positioning within the architecture, and the way these works fit around the various wall lengths, staircases and adjacent corridors that is noteworthy. The paintings are of three compositional types: some have centrally located holes or accentuated corners made from when two diagonally opposite rectangles overlap on a single panel; others have thin, ‘sliding’ crosses placed over an accentuated middle on double panels; one other has a dominantly dark rusty half-panel – made from micaceous iron oxide and with cross lines of iron filings.

So standing in the centre of the very large space, and looking at the sequence in clockwise order, the types go: corner, middle, half, middle, corner, middle, corner. It’s a stuttering but persistent, irregular pulse. Made from elements that really vary - especially in the weight and positioning of the corners, or the positioning of the intersecting cross lines - despite their being classifiable into generic types.

Bambury has been making diptyches with spindly double crosses for many years now, and some of them don’t do much in terms of dynamic. However in this show, on the wall closest to the entrance door, the work called SC099151 is quite extraordinary. It generates its excitement through its two creamy panels not having flushed edges at the top and bottom but being raised higher on the right. For despite these incongruous jumps where they butt together, the central red square and its two crosses (the underlaid solid version and its negative overlaid ‘shadow’) remain perfectly in sync. The affect from this taut interlocking tension is remarkable.

Upstairs he attempts another sort of installation using a long burnt sienna brick wall and a line of six butted pairs of painted stretchers, aligned at diagonal angles. Within each pair, the top stretcher is slightly wider than the one below, the lopsided counterweight flicking a hint of centrifugal spin into the composition. The joined pairs alternate between same colours or contrasting ones - using red, white, and black – and are grouped in three sets of two, aligned to top left, top right and then top left again. Like this.

My feeling that is the angle of alignment is too steep to fully integrate the six doubles, and that the two angles of alignment might work better if they were closer to the vertical.

The downstairs installation is worth spending some serious time with. Of the three types, the paintings with holes, overlapping rectangles and pronounced corners aren’t as successful individually as the others, though their odd lack of balance and avoidance of delicate form or line makes them adventurous planar experiments. Worth visiting for SC099151 alone.

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Name on the Millar show

Robert Jahnke's paintings, plaques and sculpture

Robert Jahnke: Bed of Roses
Bath St
4 November - 28 November 2009

Robert Jahnke is well known for his pithy, precisely made and precisely thought-through wall sculptures that deal with post-colonial issues and Māori-Pakeha relations. They often utilize metonymy in the form of enlarged objects (such as tools like stamps or axes) representing government interests or acts of land appropriation.

Although still with a history-focussed literary sensibility, his practice has shifted in recent years away from juxtaposing visual tropes towards analysing writing structures like aphorisms. From an interest in poetry initially explored by Hotere in the late sixties, Jahnke has developed a ‘stencilled’ aphoristic text on black lacquered steel panels – often incorporating repeated intertwined background rose motifs in the manner of the American artist Christopher Wool.

Sweet-smelling roses and sharply piercing thorns are the prevalent written and illustrated motifs in this show, plus one brass bedstead that puns on a ‘bed of roses’ - as well as symbolising the aspired state of (bi)cultural conjugal bliss. With the latter he has put ‘between the sheets’ the conflict-generating Foreshore and Seabed issue about treaty and customary rights – notably the Governmental Ministerial Panel formed last March to review the 2004 F & S Act that overturned Māori claims, and from which a decision is expected at the end of this year.

The Bath St show consists of eleven lacquer on stainless steel works (most are a metre squared) that feature rose, thorn and leaf imagery usually with repeated aphoristic texts. Apart from glossy or matt black the colour symbolism extends from sienna-brown to grey-white for the letters and/or plants, and around the outside of the central oval, and as Jahnke’s clearly worded catalogue says, his non-traditional works (what is termed ‘non-customary’) ‘are Māori-centric in terms of content, and have been created by an artist who has the right to self-identification as Māori.’ This in spite of its use of the rose as an example of ‘ethnic capture of non-Maori imagery’ – something that has been going on since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

These works vary in motive from expressions of sorrow for the passing of loved ones or acts of injustice to condemnations of Pakeha ignorance. The Among Thorns Grow Roses painting series, in six parts, is a specific meditation on the Foreshore and Seabed Act, taken up again with the bedstead and aphorism installation.

Rose imagery, in the form of lead sculpture painted in black lacquer, featured in Jahnke’s last exhibition at Bath St two years ago. What seem to be new in emphasis are the aphorisms. He has two sets of six on the walls each side of the bedstead, which has a densely packed grid of pink fabric roses positioned over a large glowing lightbox.

Looking at the twelve truisms, some seem accurate (“ However long the sun shines upon a thistle it will never be a rose”), some cynical (“Roses fall, thorns remain”), others facile (“Truths and roses have thorns”), and a few derivative (“Strew not roses before swine”). The rose and thorn metaphor seems in Jahnke’s hands to be about the necessity of compromise, like in a marriage relationship. Pain and gain go together.

With his persona, Jahnke projects an earnest, contemplative, very considered sensibility. Nothing impulsive or flippant gets manifested, unlike perhaps some much younger ‘Maori’ artists, like say Wayne Youle, who whilst serious, can also surprise or shock Māori and Pakeha audiences with an exuberantly ‘Poppy’, non-academic approach.

Yet there is a subtly humorous side to Jahnke, that I for one, have never noticed before. The tacky (if not bawdy) brass bedstead is proof of that. Whilst colonial, it must also be tongue-in-cheek – as perhaps also is the dinky, very dated stencilled font and the fact that some words are merged together. This, and the use of colour, seems to be new. Nice move.