Revamping, revitalising stock

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Mark Amery visits the Seymour show at McLeavey's

Ava Seymour: Tree songs
Peter McLeavey Gallery,
until Saturday 17 April 2010

Photographing Ava Seymour’s latest exhibition at Peter McLeavey’s is quite unnerving. These exquisite dark, dark works almost disappear when shot, lit only by natural light and the aura of McLeavey’s sole ancient domestic lighting fixture. Instead, as the above images well demonstrate, you and the room are reflected. The large triptych that dominates this exhibition comes to resemble a set of mirrored wardrobe sliding doors.

In the act of photographing a photograph of an enlarged collage behind glass, it is almost as if all these dimensions have neatly folded in on themselves like cubist origami. How aware was this experienced and subtle photo collagist of the effects of siting these works - created during Seymour’s recent McCahon House Residency in Titirangi - in these rooms?

The spectral spookiness of these work’s presence is echoed by their nocturnal mystery and play in abstraction with capturing light and the prismatic colour spectrum. As McLeavey noted on my visit, photography can be considered painting with light. Here in photographing A3 sized paper collages, blowing them up to figure height, and then placing them at a distance from us behind glass, Seymour plays adventurously and with a degree of complexity with painting and photographic techniques, and the space in between them.

Even up close the work is difficult to read, affected hugely in McLeavey’s space by what the sun is doing outside. The viewer and their environment’s reflection in the work appears a deliberate wish. The experience of looking at these works under direct light as most other galleries provide with their purpose-made gallery lighting systems (and as you can do here by holding up one small unhung work to the light) is radically different. The choice of McLeavey’s rooms to first show them sees their muted nocturnal softness amplified without any need to darken the space.

The McCahon residency studio is, I understand, surrounded by tall Kauri and Kahikatea, and to look at the large triptych here is to feel you could be sitting in a darkened space in the thick of the forest in the middle of the night. You appreciate for example the play of moonlight as it travels a dappled leafy path into your inner chamber, broken in its dimensional throw by tree trunks like cubist shards.

Suitably the exhibition is entitled Tree Songs, and I was immediately reminded of the immersion of McCahon’s large series The Wake. A poetic lament, it features the dim vertical strokes of the Kauri, and was completed at night on McCahon’s return to Titirangi from his visit to the States.

Like a midnight garden of musky perfumes, Seymour’s work is also a dreamy nocturne. Intensely musical, it is a work of dark sensual delights playing with a majestic but hazy rainbow of purples, greens, scarlets, gold and silver. Shadowy vertical bands and circles make the work resemble a dense thicket of musical notes on a giant stave. Yet, at the same time as having the microscopic immersion of prisms of light in the forest, the work is also suggestive of the cosmos.

The works are unusually, defiantly dark, demanding you to step up close and move across the surface to appreciate the work. And just as you have to move to pick up shifts in the work against the glass surface glare, streams of circles have subtly lit edges from various different directions. These and Malevich-like small square patches provide pretty much the only strong lighting from within the work.

Those still hoping Seymour will return to the terrain of her punk figurative photo montages of the mid 90s are left wanting. Content is not at stake in the same way here. Instead the beauty of the montage and how it might see photography operate like abstract painting as visual music is explored.

The most aggressive thing about these works is how you’re made acutely aware of the awkwardness of looking - peering in and shifting your placement to detect the colour modulations, trying to get past yourself staring back in the glass. It’s irritating to be sure, but it sets up an interesting tension between viewer and abstraction. The reward is that this work manages to rise above its swish of the trails of modernism to encourage a new way of looking at photography and two dimensional work in general.

McLeavey’s rooms also come filled with other artists’ shadows. While McCahon’s influence is clear in the mood and size of the work, it’s devoid of his signs, symbols and personal questions. Formally its far more akin in rhythm and music to another McLeavey stablemate and collagist, Gordon Walters. This is particularly the case in four small works’ strong play with one or two circles and a wide vertical strip on another colour field. The vertical strip could again allude to the trees. The mood is nocturnal, lit dimly by the moon. The tension in these works lies in the delicacy with which Seymour plays with the edge of her cutout shapes, providing some bite in the formation of a dimensional space. Yet they don’t hold the mystery of the large triptych.

The work swims in the pool of modernist abstraction and the influences McCahon brought to bear on his work in Titirangi. Here you might find many echoes. The schemes and colour play of Sonia Delaunay and Kandinsky, the collage of Braque and Picasso, the shapes of Malevich and Mondrian, and mood boards of Rothko, all shifting across each other and rising up to the surface like bubbles. In this way the work is the most interesting consideration of abstract painting through photography, and indication of its painterly potential, I can recall.

Positioning this, placing that

Collage: Mladen Bizumic, Ava Seymour, Richard Maloy, John Nixon, Gordon Walters
Sue Crockford
16 September - 3 October 2009

Collage is one of those techniques we tend to think of as a classic twentieth century method of image construction, but the fact that the Victorians were also entertained by it hints at its flexibility as an application for many different mind sets. This show presents several approaches, most as finished objects for contemplation, but not all.

With Gordon Walters it was an aid for visualising the planned musicality or rhythmic cadences of a koru composition, a means of mentally grasping vertical, horizontal, or diagonal formal connections, and their cumulative weight. Collage for him grew out of his early passion for Surrealism but became not the final artwork but a stage in a process that led to a later more polished result. Placement and scale were gradually worked on simultaneously.

Ava Seymour’s expertise focuses on collages that are constructed in order to be photographed. With the current work her nuances of edge are crucial: tiny shapes harboured inside the scalpel incised contours are formed by overlaid pieces cut out of furnishing or fabric catalogues. While there are delicate textural, patterned and tonal contrasts going on internally, it is along the perimeter, where colour meets the white background field that things get really interesting. Your eye scoots around the edge like a racetrack, enjoying each new corner or projecting bump it encounters.

Richard Maloy, like Seymour, is a gifted photographer, but how his images of improvised sculpture, using his own body with silver foil, fit in here I’m not sure. They don’t appear to be collage at all - whereas Mladen Bizumic’s images for example (on another wall) of sky inside strings of triangular pennants floating in front of Mies van der Rohe buildings are Photoshopped. They definitely have a collage sensibility.

Collage is normally linked to the substance of paper, but because of its twentieth century tradition that developed from Schwitters through Rauschenberg and others, that particular material has been replaced by other possibilities. Collage, it might be argued, is now more about a certain attitude to space, pictorial or real. Jessica Stockholder is a good example of this.

The fifth artist at Crockford's, John Nixon, has paintings from his Experimental Painting Workshop that are often with no added paper. Instead they incorporate other evocative materials like plastic packaging or aluminium strips. These, combined with his buoyant orange panels that allude to early modernism, help create a seductive physicality.

I just can’t imagine contemporary art, literature, or music existing without collage. It is a fundamental disposition inherent in most practice that accentuates the propensity for play - via juxtaposing various properties (semantic or formal) of materials. Since Freud we have been aware of its similarities with dreams, and the pleasures (or terrors) of being surprised by unforeseen connections. Artists who ignore such portable intricacies of placement are almost nonexistent.

(In descending order: Seymour (2),Walters(2), Maloy, Bizumic, Nixon. The Gordon Walters koru collage above (fourth down) is not in the show. However it is a good example of this stage in his painting process.)

The bowels of the 'burbs

From the depths of suburbia: Photo-media from Auckland
Curated by Serena Bentley
Te Tuhi
25 July - 27 September 2009

These seven Auckland artists work in photo-media with suburban content as a theme. They were chosen by Serena Bentley for an exhibition that was initially presented in Queensland at Griffith University last May.

Many of their works have been recently shown in inner city Auckland (namely City Art Rooms and Anna Miles) or the K’ Rd art circuit (Michael Lett and Ivan Anthony), but not of course in Pakuranga. And it is intriguing to see them assembled this way. Edith Amituanai, Steve Carr, Conor Clarke, Sam Hartnett, Geoffrey Heath, Ava Seymour and Yvonne Todd make an unexpected but interesting combination.

Why is that? Well firstly, it reconnoitres the topic of the home, dealing with the fenced off street, the lawn, the outer walls of the house, and then zeroing into the intimate living spaces. Dwellings and backyards only, not dairies or shopping centres.

Secondly, there is a lot of humour. Even the creepy stuff is amusing. For example there is a hint that within Ava Seymour’s photographed collages of rubber fetish couples these unorthodox people are just as dreary and unimaginative as the rest of us – maybe more so. Her state housing images though are offensive to many viewers brought up in such homes. They regularly make her audience furious – but that in itself for others is a source of hilarity. After all it is art, and need not be taken at face value. Provocation is commonplace.

Yvonne Todd’s large single Frenzy is funny too, but really deadpan with her impeccably made up model wearing an inordinately large, flouncy, voluminous dress and ludicrous rabbitlike teeth. She reclines elegantly on a concrete floor surrounded concrete blocks, beams of building timber, and straggly strips of filthy carpet.

Steve Carr’s suite of photos of granddads wearing Dracula teeth are just as silly, but more restrained. Only the mouths give the game away. However it is his videos that tend to dominate the exhibition, even though of the four, only one has sound. He makes wonderful studies of children (and himself) having fun playing, often revealing their anxieties simultaneously.

For example, when three little boy ‘Indians’ jump on Steve the ‘cowboy’ in order to tie him to the clothesline and squirt him with the hose, the fourth ‘Indian’, a girl, is apprehensive and reluctant to participate. (She is either very shy, or thinks the male behaviour too absurd to bother with.) Likewise in another work, when Carr is distributing free snow freezes one or two don’t want them, or if they do, eat with such intense (almost fearful) concentration that you wonder if they are getting any pleasure at all.

Sam Hartnett has an impressive array of entertaining outdoor images: a giant concrete teapot with a large red and yellow Choysa label; road cones, spin-driers and televisions in treetops; a bizarre, elongated, homemade tricycle; two fox furs draped over a clothesline in a sun porch next to a suspended potted cactus. You laugh out loud and wonder how he found these odd subject matters.

Likewise the more formal, but just as gut-wrenching, images by Conor Clarke – especially her three shots of fan trellises fastened to brick houses in Grey Lynn. One, with a heavily cut back punga, looks disturbing like a crushed or deformed bird with compacted feathery frills. It looks like a boa sprouting out of some sort of squat fungus.

The images of Edith Amituanai and Geoffrey Heath, the obviously successful ones that is, differ from the above in that they don’t emphasise humour but focus on composition. Heath’s lightjet print of a young man in his skants on a couch working the remote control is beautifully organised, with the vertical slants of the background Venetian blind offsetting the furniture’s spiralling fabric patterns and drooping parabola of the remote’s lead.

The best Amituanai photograph is the oldest and smallest, a coloured framed work (Fipe’s Lounge) that is six years old. Various family photographs and religious reproductions are hung on two walls that meet in a corner. They bob up and down in a line near the image’s top, while an assortment of small objects, vases and lamps create counter-rhythms on the card-table, television, stereo and little coffee table below.

This is an excellent exhibition that allows you to re-examine and reconsider some works you might like a second look at. It would be interesting if Bentley did a similar show of Queensland photography dealing with the same theme – to see how different (if at all) that would be.

Against interpretation

Noli me legere
Michael Lett
8 October – 1 November 2008

The Latin title of this show can be translated as ‘Don’t read me,’ and is usually understood as linked to the influential philosopher, Maurice Blanchot whose writings attacked the conventional notions of author, literature and interpretation by introducing the aspect of death. “Don’t read me” means assume nothing. Don’t try and decipher. There is a clear sense in all the works included – cleverly selected by Sarah Hopkinson – of obliqueness, of disrupting a coherent narrative, of blocking the possibility of interpretation.

Particularly memorable is a wonderful short film ‘Ben’, by English film-maker Emily Wardill. Here two voice–overs alternate, while maintaining continuity across blank screens or sequences of seemingly unrelated images, many of which include black and white props with coloured backdrops. One voice is that of a professional hypnotist. Seductive, creamy, and masculine, it coaxes acquiescence from a group of women on stage with their eyes shut. The other voice is from a West Indian or African woman speaking English as a second language in hesitant, faltering bursts. She reads a divided up text, a psycho-analytic case study, about a 52 year old delivery van driver, a loner whose unorthodox social and sexual habits are getting noticed by his neighbours and workmates. The voices hold our attention and propel us along as try to connect their words with the images and interwoven themes.

The highly regarded German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has four enigmatic coloured images in the show. Two look at hazy light coming through the flopped-over end of a sheet of photographic paper, one makes formal connections between different sized and patterned eggshells on a table with pods and strange cones, and the other has long dried leaves protruding from a small vase comically intertwining with a floral tie.

Influential artist and educator, Jim Allen contributes a very mysterious photograph, taken doing one of his pioneering performances at Auckland Art Gallery in the mid seventies. Black and white, with glossy coal blacks, and dramatic lighting, it shows a group of stooped figures, wearing hooded smocks of crumpled paper, standing like statues huddled over a greasy, dishevelled floor. A memorable image.

Hany Armanious‘s contribution is a cast, limited edition, wall-sculpture with unusual components like a photograph of a granite modernist sculpture of male and female forms, their bowed heads mimicking the curved toes of two feet in an adjacent leaning image. Hanging from its right-hand end are two identically cast, pink forms that are partially pig’s trotter and partially boxing glove. The whole work intrigues. It seems to revolve around assorted visual puns on fingers and toes.

A glassed over aluminium box mounted on the wall by Simon Denny, contains three painted vertical strips of MDF, one boxed fluro tube and some junk-mail advertising, but mainly two elegant black and photographs of a saloon car. These could, by themselves, almost be mistaken for a conceptual work by Christopher Williams. The images are nearly identical but not, even when de-reversed, and relate to the b/w Jim Allen positioned on the opposite wall.

Finally, Ava Seymour’s pristine photographed collage which greets you at the gallery entrance, is more complicated than usual with its clusters of triangular forms. Yet her work is now so tasteful it seems hard to connect Seymour’s present imagery with earlier controversies like her rubber-fetish and ‘Hannah Hoch visits state-housing’ projects. ‘Jubilee’ fits in well with the Hopkinson’s theme, despite its comparative blandness. It is an icy, blemish-free configuration; attractive, though bafflingly hard to locate semantically.