Making visible

Dark Matter: W. D. Hammond, Peter Madden, Andre Tjaberings
Curated by Simon Esling, essay by Anna Parlane
Window
26 June - 24 July 2009

It is extremely interesting to see the sort of stellar line up like the above at a 'research' facility like Window, basically because the exhibtion is so mainstream, and not involved with experimental ideas at all. I would worry if suddenly all Window shows started becoming like dealer gallery venues or municipal gallery spaces, but Esling’s selection, presented with a black back wall (adding to the ambience of the thick tinted glass), seems to be a shrewd ploy to attract a new audience to the site. While I was there writing this, a number of people came over and examined the show – for Window on a Friday night, an unusual occurrence. Even in the entrance of a university library.

And so they should. The gothic theatricality works well. The largest work, a 1995 framed Hammond work on paper of an energetically tangoing couple accompanied a standing huia-man working on his laptop, a horse headed gentleman facing us while looking over a landscape on a pool table , and in the background another birdman in a state of reverie on a settee.

Peter Madden’s work looks superb here too: a glass sphere half full of gold leaf (opulence for its own sake); a ‘bush’ of hundreds of hovering butterflies suspended over a black prostrate skeleton; an amazing futurist portrait of a fissured fragmented face, with birds, fish, buildings, insects, plants and shells all exploding out of it.

The surprise is designer Andre Tjaberings; his two de Chiricolike graphite and wash drawings mix in Magritte and Piranesi to create a surreal, architectural space of crumbling three-dimensional geometry – immersed in billowing smoke. Not so ‘full on’ as his companions, Tjaberings has more delicacy and understatement, a stylistic restraint within his exploration of imaginary space.

Three cheers for Esling for doing this project, and a bouquet of flowers for not including his own work, as some artist-curators do. It is a little odd getting someone else to do the writing but Anna Parlane does a good (but very brief) job in grouping the three artists together under the astronomical title - with its references to invisible but detectable masses that play a crucial role in galaxy formation. Hopefully the project will win Window more visibility and more friends in the wider Auckland art community.