Disappointing

I’ve wandered much of late: Vivien Masters, Olga Tuzhba, Chloe King, Jennifer Mayer, Philip Good
St. Paul St 3 (in Symonds St)
AUT
13 – 16 August 2008

This is a small group show of final year AUT students doing BVAs, in a space that has been recently acquired by the institution. It is currently in a makeshift state but hopefully St. Paul St 3 will soon be brought up to scratch with proper lights and lining - so it can compete with other university galleries around town, like say the George Fraser.

It’s a very uneven exhibition. Jennifer Mayer’s photographs, organised in two sets of three, owe a lot to Sam Taylor Wood, but at least they look like a substantial body. Some other artists, like Olga Tuzhba, only have two photographs (of shrubs digitally blended into spare interiors) where more are needed.

Vivien Masters has a projection where the wall looks blank most of the time. Then suddenly without warning, a sequence of 12 -15 coloured images are rapidly fired onto the screen, after which we get a blank screen once more. The process is then repeated. The staccatoed shots of blurred faces, mouths, parts of clothing or meals, seem to be about intimate relationships and the bombardment of human emotion through the senses.

Chloe King, in collaboration with Olga Toujba, has built a shelter of cardboard boxes accompanied by a voiceover describing the civil war between Georgia and Abkhazia, a conflict that has been raging since 1962. Most of us don’t know about this fight. It seems the artists are attempting to arouse international interest, perhaps even ultimately UN intervention. However using rambling, tentative, unedited voice-overs like this is pitiful, and too derivative of Nova Paul as a method. A cohesive balanced package with images, maps and careful historical explanations would be far more effective than relying on one individual’s commentary to get the gist across.

Philip Good’s panels of thinly applied oil paint, depicting suburban backyards or abandoned lots are also disappointing. The tonal weight within his images is inconsistent and unresolved spatially. Parts jump out with no logical reason why.

This is not a good exhibition. It’s too derivative and undistinctive. Perhaps the earlier two shows in this series were better. Anyway, hopefully AUT can get the space cleaned up before long, so that a superb venue matching the other two galleries opens soon.