Discreetly activist

Comb a schooner like a comet: Annie Bradley, Matthew Crookes, Peter Madden, Charles Ninow, Beth Orton, Ralph Paine, Martyn Reynolds, Daniel Webby, Tao Wells
Newcall
1 December - 19 December 2009

Seeking work that was opinionated, inclined to agitation and direct, the Newcall curators for this exhibition have approached nine artists who according to the blurb, have practices oriented towards 'activism or confrontation.' At the same time, the curators are sensitive. They are cognisant of Free Will, that of the artists and their own in selecting them. So nothing can be assumed in terms of product.

That last bit is crucial because this is not really a placard waving show – though Tao Wells’ invitation of audience participation in placing photographs (with the word WAR) of the gallery neighbourhood in the gallery neighbourhood, and Ralph Paine’s large wall of paintings and drawings on paper, come closest to that lack of nuance in that their subject matter is obvious.

Wells’ project involves a box of 24 photocopied images of the gallery and the streets around it over which is placed WAR in bold yellow caps. He asks the viewer to either stick them up inside the gallery and/or outside, or to sell them as books. A couple ended up on Newcall walls, including one of some colourful birds placed over a power socket, folded so the word WAR was hidden. I didn’t spot any outdoor versions, except an Obama /Bush hybrid on the front door.

Ralph Paine’s wall-sized offering shows off his superb skills as an illustrator: images of jets, medieval battles, lots of explosions, curling waves, agonised skeletons and burning cities - the latter alluding to say, Beirut or Baghdad. All beautifully rendered in an understated fashion with no fine detail. And surprisingly for Paine – no text.

I didn’t see Peter Madden’s ‘para-performance’ on opening night – a found suitcase opened to reveal found photographs, but on a nearby wall is a small solitary photograph of what seems to be a group of sportsmen - maybe cricketers. A standing figure on the right has superimposed over half his body a military uniform, suggesting somebody killed in the Second World War.

Matthew Crookes has three works. One is a suite of sticky, peel-off letters that repeat the phrase In Loving Memory on a top corner of the glass front door. A second is a row on the floor of empty plastic book covers, all blood red. The third is a dessert spoon resting on a short piece of four by two. On its scoop are the stickered words: lick me disease.

Martyn Reynolds has a DVD presentation of a short looped film showing an old wooden chair standing in an empty field. It is projected onto a thin wall from an outside studio which when you look, contains the same chair holding the projector. The evocative flickering image is blue, that most poignant of colours; the chair a symbol for absence; the field perhaps a trope for European soil. We have pathos, yet a construction that is calculatedly knowing in its reflexivity.

Beth O’Brien’s single framed photograph of a young woman soldier struggling in a park to control an unwieldy, wind-dragged parafoil. Quiet Decisions, Specific Intentions seems to be an anti-military statement of considerable understatement, snorting at the notion of ‘managed’ intervention.

Uncontrollable process is showcased also in Daniel Webby’s installation, where a sloping ‘hammock’ of clear, wrinkled, cling film is suspended across the width of the gallery space between two towel holders. On it Webby has attempted to balance a gooey line of soaked dehydrated potato flakes, which has then fallen to the concrete floor. Attracting mould and smelling, the spud glop was later removed –though traces remain.

Annie Bradley contributes a two channelled video showing the artist and (I think) her father placing some household items in a trailer to be transported overnight. They need to be very securely tied down so they don’t slide around and get damaged. If you only know one knot… has one camera positioned on the van roof filming the trailer from above, while the other is partially aimed at a reflective window in the van’s door. The title advocates multiple approaches to problem-solving.

The last item is Charles Ninow’s sculpture that consists of two white trapezoid plywood forms on the floor. They seem to refer to the sloping eaves of a house and the demarcated proportions - measured out with steel brackets – of a sheet of a single bed. To speculate: the sheet in this context could be a shroud, and the ceiling, the ascension of a soul escaping from a corpse. An oblique and clinical, but also oddly evocative, work.

Shortly after writing and posting the above I was chatting to Dan Arps at Te Tuhi. He pointed out that the 'steel brackets' on the sloping upper surfaces of Charles Ninow's work are in fact anti-skateboarding blockers - an allusion to social control and American foreign policy perhaps.

Looped to shred, shred to loop

Daniel Webby: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Window
31 July – 28 August 2009

This onsite installation by Daniel Webby in the foyer of the university library walks a sort of high-wire act between the conceptually rich text he has carefully prepared, and the gallery’s online work by Michael Kontopoulos (Removal Studies) - where an unseen machine constantly removes bedding from a sleeping figure, the machine's creator.

In the narrow Window gallery space Webby has constructed an upright headless torso from wire netting and white plastic shopping bags. It has upraised arms and is standing in a pile of shredded paper. For Webby, this is a clumsily made sculpture - one that is heavy-handed compared to say his ACFA installation last year or the earlier work he made with Boris Dornbusch for Room 103 – but it is funny, in a grim black sense, with its references to mindless wastage.

It raises the question of the relationship between the slivers of paper and the figure. Is the paper from the absent head, or from other figures destroyed by a rapidly encroaching virus? Maybe it is from Kontopoulos’s bed.

Webby’s takeaway text – which is partially shredded - discusses three elements of research:

Firstly, sociologist Robert Merton’s interest in self-perpetuating, snowballing systems of economic and cultural capital that favour the advantaged and which he links to the Biblical quote from Matthew that is the title for this show.

Secondly, new types of influenza that prey not on the weak but the healthy, that have a feedback looping system where a pathogenic virus can feed on immune systems that strengthen instead of weakening it.

Thirdly, David Bohm’s attempt to blend recent quantum notions of subject-dependent strategies of observing matter with earlier Newtonian subject-object principles, by inventing the verb form the rheomode. This concept incorporates movement in thinking and has the verb itself, not nouns, determining declensional structuring.

Webby’s project looks like it is based on a predetermined narrative about looping that determines his imagery. His Window display is not as complicated (or as satisfying - to me anyway) as his earlier work, though his notes replace visual complexity with semantic layering. An unusual show.

Rights and liberties

Article 27: Xin Cheng, Kah Bee Chow, Majlinda Hoxha, Tui Kerehoma, Jasmine Lockheart, Christina Read, Daniel Webby
Curated by Richard Dale
Northart Gallery, Norman King Square, Northcote Shopping Centre
10 December - 22 December 2009


This December is the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The title of this modest little exhibition in North Shore examines the fundamental human rights expressed in Article 27 in particular. It focuses on firstly the right of individuals and smaller communities to have a voice that is not drowned out by larger, more dominant communities, and secondly, the right of authors, scientists, inventors and artists to gain material reward and/or moral recognition for their labours. The Human Rights Commission in this country approached Richard Dale, the Auckland freelance curator normally known for his work with videos of Chinese performance art, to assemble this show.

The seven individuals he has picked from the Auckland region make up a display that is not finger-wagging or tub-thumping. It is much more nuanced. And although their cultural backgrounds are varied, that issue is not forced. There is no enforced template through which the exhibits have been squeezed. The show has a nice relaxed flow to it.

Two artists that have created installations using books, provide conceptual ‘bookends’ for the show. One is about how books, their content, titles, authors and publishers can sometimes be perceived – so they end up being banned. The other is the practical use of their content. How they can help us make useful objects.

Christina Read’s shelf of various banned books reveals not real publications but hard-covered mock ups made from other books painted with bright colours, applied hand lettering and white pages. This assortment is more fascinating than if say she had just got all the books out of the library, or bought them. They look exuberantly quirky, as if handmade. However one has to be really curious to find out why they were ever banned and by whom. The artist doesn’t explain, but most Google searches provide clear explanations for innocuous books like Black Beauty, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or publications by Dr.Seuss. Read’s display looks at freedom of written speech, and how vulnerable that possibility is.

Daniel Webby turns that vulnerable relationship between one individual and a wider community to a videoed game, a recorded performance where two blindfolded people toss uncooked eggs to each other to catch. The exercise explores the limits of telepathy, where actions are based on some knowledge, and also intuition or instinct. It examines justification for actions, and the relationship of responsible decision making to intelligent guesswork.

The five works by Jasmine Lockhart oscillate between a bushy-tailed innocence and a moody cynicism. The utopian visions of universal love and peace (with the peace v-fingers sign in a glass box) and a cut-out masonite shrub give way to doubts where all objects are smothered with an anaemic, pale ‘snifter’ green (from silage covers).It is akin to hospital wall green, designed to calm patients down and lower the heart rate. Around the corner, away from the chirpy Kiwi outdoors, is an All Blacks carry bag, its logo lit from a fluorescent light inside. It refers to the conflict of the 1981 Springbok tour, the year of the artist’s birth, the split between the ideal harmonious Aotearoa and its acrimonious underbelly.

Majlinda Hoxha and her family recently came to New Zealand from the troubled republic of Kosovo. Her poignant photographs are unusual in that they reference the Serbian massacres of Albanians and the NATO bombing, by photographing the Auckland swimming pools at Parnell and Panmure. In one Hoxha and her family stand with closed eyes at one end of an empty pool as if it was a site of some terrible atrocity, and in the other we see a public sign in front of stagnant water that says ‘Bombing allowed’ – referring of course to ‘dive bombing’ where idiot jumpers try to make noisy splashes and spectacular waves.

More remote historical events are referenced by Kah Bee Chow in her One Day Sculpture project which was set in Wellington’s Haining St. The three videos show the discussions within the local community about the history of the street, particularly in the ‘Chinatown’ region. There is some discussion of the racially motivated murder of Joe Kum Yung by Lionel Terry in 1905, and also the role of the Sister Aubert Home for Compassion.

Historical events are also examined in the photograph by Tui Kerehoma of ‘mummified’ heads carried on the back of a gliding glass swan that seems to be an ashtray. These don’t appear to be moko mokai. Though they look emaciated they are not tattooed. They are made of white soap and because of that seem to refer to Europe not the Pacific. The material has overtones of fat from concentration camps that was made into soap, and the washing away of guilt from various atrocities. Below the image is a cup, on which are engraved lyrics from the Kenny Rogers song The Gambler.

For me personally the highlight of the show is the Reading Room by Xin Cheng. On a table is an assortment of unusual books teaching or demonstrating how to make needed utensils out of recycled rubbish, and completed examples are presented on the walls. A major theme is prison life, but not all. Bush survival is included, as are urban on-the–spot modifications or inventions improvised by city dwellers. There is even a SAS military handbook. It is a fascinating collection.

Dale has constructed an intriguing exhibition that deserves a bigger audience, as it has been under publicised. Fortunately it is going to The Physics Room in Christchurch. Hopefully other venues will pick up on it.

Photographed works from top to bottom are by Christina Read, Daniel Webby, Jasmine Lockhart, Majlinda Hoxha, Kah Bee Chow, Tui Kerehoma, and Xin Cheng.

Floral Impasse

Daniel Webby: Stalemate Bloom
A Centre For Art
10 September – 4 October 2008

I’d seen Webby’s work before at R103, but that was a collaborative project, a film with an installation, and this new work took me by surprise.

The main component is a vaulting horse (the type you find in a gymnasium) made of split punga posts. It has one side removed so you can see there is a square hole cut in the floor. It obviously references the War World Two prison camp film, ‘The Great Escape’, perhaps with the artist seeing himself as Steve McQueen, but with a crack at the hermeticism of the art world and Webby wanting to tunnel his way out.

In one corner of the small ACFA room is a video loop of the Romanian Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci performing her legendary ten out of ten routine on the parallel bars. She obviously has caused her local gymnastic (artistic) rival to mentally collapse. Perhaps she is a symbol for Duchamp (the title referring to chess.) The stress of competing with perfection has made him want to flee.

The vault’s padded top consists of a couple of bags of potting mix with several sprouts of parsley growing out. From one end of the vault is a small mattress impaled by a grid of wooden pegs like the boxing laid for foundations of a building. On the other side, where normally a springboard would go, is a small pile of dirt with two basketball boots sticking out, as if the artist were buried head first. The whole thing is strikingly enigmatic and funny.

Webby probably has narrative explanations for all these elements, but you don’t need the artist’s exegesis to enjoy the work or even understand it. The whole thing is dripping with poetic paradox: a secret tunnel being dug which is open to view; removed dirt instead of being hidden is in potting mix growing parsley; a tunnel digger plonked vertically in the ground by mysterious forces.

A terrific piece of sculpture worth traipsing up to the third floor of Achilles House for.

Exhibition with two balls

Boris Dornbusch & Daniel Webby: I always say the contrary to what you say. I always say the same as you.
rm103, Auckland
28 February - 15 March 2008

The title of this show is one of those riddle-like exercises in paradox that searches for meaning in the face of illogical contradiction, like the famous example, a philosopher from Crete who announced ‘all Cretans are liars.’

The two rooms at rm 103 are thematically linked, but not in a manner that is overtly super-tight. Dornbusch's video is hilarious: at the centre of its bottom edge we see a basket-ball hoop, around which are repeated shots at goal, all failures.

Webby’s adjacent room shows a basket-ball on the floor surrounded by broken glass. It has come through the window, and left a large hole in its centre.

Taped to the ball is a mobile phone, which when rung – using a number provided on the wall – tells you ‘this number is not permitted to receive calls.’

Oddly, parts of the blurb on the gallery site seems more appropriate for Gambia Castle than rm103:
Two like things may be considered members of a set, thus the body which emerges is that of the set, with the constituent members lost.

Like the current Tahi Moore show at Gambia Castle, lack of success is a theme here, but encased within a riddling title. The video in particular is quite wonderful. Even funnier than Steve Carr. Well worth a visit.