Northern fields, southern lights

Hannah and Aaron Beehre: Postcard to Casablanca & Rodriguez
Te Tuhi
25 July - 27 September 2009

The Beehres are famous for their sound-sensitive interactive installations. Their work generates shrieks of pleasure from children in normally quiet municipal institutions, as they jump up and down or clap to make leaves fall off bushes on big LCD screens. They are a real pain because they force a grizzling grumpy-guts like me to bring ear-muffs whenever I visit.

This current Te Tuhi work happily doesn’t seem to need sound to work. I think the Beehres use heat – cumulatively acquired from bodies standing in the gallery space. The screen shows (I think - though it might be clover) a small field of lavender surrounded by conifers, with lots of hazy sky above. When two or more people are in the room an aurora gets activated, with pink flickering, wobbly lines snaking their way across the sky from left to right. The effect is dramatic, but is only generated by a certain critical mass. Otherwise, by yourself you only see the field.

That lilac-coloured field is a European image. You would never see such a sight in Aotearoa. The Beehre’s aurora is deliberately more like one of those large gas-filled bulbs with crackling electrical discharges jumping between filaments than a true aurora borealis (Northern Lights). Which is more like psychedelic sheet-lightning.

Their version is closer to an aurora australis (Southern Lights). It’s a clever joke that has a logic built in so that at least two people are needed to grasp it – such as untravelled persons from each hemisphere. Together they can compare meteorologies and botanies. A tight weave of technique and content.

Psychedelic days; Lynchian nights

Hannah and Aaron Beehre 2008
Vavasour Godkin
7 August – 6 September 2008

Hannah and Aaron Beehre are known in the art world for their popular interactive ‘paintings’ where loud noises make shrubs on large plasma screens start to drop their leaves. Excitable children love them, especially in Christchurch Art Gallery.

This Auckland show presents domestic-sized, framed works. The four that are interactive use dark-toned photographs, with night-time images of Hagley Park that are inspired by David Lynch’s TV series ‘Twin Peaks.’ (Slightly different from the film of the same name, also called ‘Fire Walk with Me’, that is not so soapy, much creepier and with a smaller cast.)

The shots of Hagley Park are taken round by Christchurch's Public Hospital, Botanical Gardens and sports playing fields. They have been made into ‘sublimation prints’, where intense dyes are applied to a thin gauzelike synthetic material so the fallen autumn leaves become bright pink. There is no distortion, but there is definitely a ‘trippy’ ambience in the daylight imagery of the non-interactive works. Their shapes have an attractive but discreet flatness, slightly like landscape images from early railway calendars of the twenties.

The interactive night-time ones show forest clearings and brooks where murders, hideous acts of sexual violence and furtive drug deals might occur. Any close proximity of the viewer gets small groups of mauve fireflies circling between the lower branches. Their colour is restrained. You have to look closely.

I think you would tire of the firefly works quickly if you owned them, but the garish sunlit, avenued landscapes, perversely, are more subtle. The strangeness of their chromatic intensity is hard to pin down. Though static, they radiate a sort of delicate sci-fi impressionism and hold your interest.