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.

Interiors, exteriors

Edith Amituanai & Allan McDonald
Anna Miles
4 June - 4 July 2009

Stepping into the space, we see on opposite sides of Anna Miles’ rented room two photographic shows: five interiors within family homes by Amituanai on the left; eighteen exteriors of shop facades by McDonald on the right. Individually I prefer McDonald’s work to Amituanai’s (something about the way she plonks people in the middle of the image upsets me) but here he has far too many photographs. Twice as many as necessary, so Edith Amituanai’s relatively restrained presentation wins hands down.

Her set of photographs comes from two homes. Four images are from the Lai household, a Chin family from Myanmar, where three rooms of their new house are photographed - one of them, the sitting room, twice (family present; family absent). The shot with the Pearl drum kit, played by the eldest boy, allows us to look at the images on the wall and the objects left on the furniture. The house looks recently moved into and relatively unlived in.

Amituanai’s other image has a wide doorway in a domestic space that divides it in two so that the opening looks like a huge mirror. The carpets on the floor, despite not being aligned, seem reflected and so the gap has an unnerving presence as if solid. The image itself has a symmetry with the black leather couches that is offset by the small ebony tribal carvings on the floor and fireplace.

Allan McDonald’s images are smaller and quite different. Because they are presented without a framed edge, their impact is contained within an austere floating rectangle that hovers in front of the gallery wall. That the photograph goes right up to the oblong’s edge brings a severity that helps the frontality of his vistas; it tightens the picture-plane, makes every shape contained there sing.

It also emphasises the delicate sun bleached colours of the weather worn paint on these buildings. Over time the coating has thinned out, become desatuarated, with stains from underneath rising into view. Ornately lettered advertisements from past eras catch our eye, hand rendered people and products high above verandas, columns of stark black and white photographs lining shop windows: these details are from small town, rural New Zealand. They are relics from the past that someone has forgotten to, or cannot afford to, replace.

McDonald’s images work well because of their lack of obstructive framing. They are also brilliantly cropped. The best ones are exciting palpable objects. Not so much windows to the past but coloured panels that are very much alive in the here and now with their own finely tuned, nuanced materiality.

Auckland 08: Walters Sweepstake

The Walters Prize 2008
New Gallery
13 September - 23 November 2008

It is hard to believe it is six years since the inaugural Walters Prize exhibition opened at the New Gallery with its line up of Michael Stevenson, Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and the then unknown, Yvonne Todd. For a country that doesn’t have a national gallery the occasion was something all Kiwi contemporary artists were ecstatic about - a ray of hope that this country might see its artists not as 'dole bludgers' but as creative people with vocations. This new show reveals a lot about the event at this point of its short history, and the weaknesses of its organisational structure. For an Auckland-based prize that is meant to be championing the excitement of New Zealand contemporary art to the rest of New Zealand and the world, it is clearly floundering.

When I was at art school in the early seventies there were only four tertiary art education institutions in the whole country. Now there are more than that in Auckland alone, and the number of artists has escalated astoundingly. So when the selection committee for this year pick two past finalists (Reynolds and Robinson) to resubmit, something has to be wrong. The message is that Aotearoa doesn’t have the quantity and range of exciting practices to keep the exhibition continually fresh. In this country the inherent vibrancy needed doesn’t exist.

That is clearly not the case. More likely the committee didn’t do their homework and thoroughly scour through all the dealer exhibitions the length and breadth of the land. But with no South Island curator on the panel there was no incentive to ensure that. And with two of the four selectors from Auckland alone, the result seemed predestined to ensure Auckland parochialism, especially when the two repeating artists live in Auckland.

Enough about the politics. What about the work? The four exhibitions?

My personal favourite of the four line-ups of different years (so far) is the second one of 2004, with et al and von Sturmer. The other two exhibitors, van Hout and Fraser, though unquestionably superb artists, somehow couldn’t do themselves justice in their allocated spaces. That seems to be the regular pattern in all of the four biennial shows: in each - two crack shows; two forgettable ones.

Edith Amituanai’s Déjeuner, with its four photographs, seems only half an exhibition. She seems to have drawn the short straw in terms of space, but it shows her inadequacies as an artist as well. She is a consummate documenter of Samoan living spaces and rugby players living in France, but not an exciting thinker. Her approaches to photographic presentation are dull and conventional, even though the details of her recorded living rooms are rich and engaging. When clearly superior artists like Simon Denny (at Michael Lett) and Fiona Connor (at Gambia Castle) are ignored her inclusion looks like tokenism. I’m not saying it is, I know the panel is smarter than that, but it looks suspect.

(To briefly digress, am I here directly contradicting what I said earlier about a South Island panellist? I don’t think so. I’m not saying a South Island artist must be included, only that the panel has a South Island representative who can do the research and initiate a discussion of the issues – like what I’m doing here.)

Cloud, the work of John Reynolds, was shown in the AGNSW in the 2006 Sydney Biennale and consists of over 7000 little canvases bearing written phrases taken from Harry Orman’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English.’ Occupying the stairwell space and first room on the New Gallery's first floor, this sprawling installation of row upon rippling row of small stretchers, from floor to ceiling, looks pompous - in the tradition of overkill exemplified by the installations of Ann Hamilton and Anthony Gormley. It’s an academic exercise about language that if chosen well could be interesting, but instead ends up all surface and triviality. As few of the paintings can be read anyway it becomes the dumbest sort of spectacle.

Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae uses her two darkened rooms of glowing spot-lit photographs, moving image and sound to really stir her audience. It’s not subtle but it is innovative and entertaining - especially her images of mythic personalities within the Māori cosmology that in her hands become Neo-Gothic and Sci-Fi. There is even a hint of Hollywood productions like Batman. Though at times fragmented (her elegant images of a cane carrying dandy wearing tailored colonial attire and moko look out of place) her installation has considerable impact and will be the crowd favourite.

As I’ve said, Robinson like Reynolds should not be here - but seeing that he is, his installational revamping of his 2006 ARTSPACE project is my favourite anyway. It is all class, a polystyrene intestinal phallus run rampant, running down corridors and bursting through walls like an angry blind worm. Conceptually layered to include references from Tex Avery (Looney Tunes)and early Giacometti to Wittgenstein (duck-rabbit diagram) and Stephen Hawking (universe model), Robinson’s inclusion of blue beaks, rabbit ears, willies and doughnuts brings a festive chromatic musicality to his exuberant project.

So who will Catherine David give the $50,000 prize to in late October? David is not a person one would attempt to second-guess. Even as an expert on modernism’s relationship to - and blending with - post-colonialism, she is vehemently anti-formulaic. Though I think AAG messed up badly in the processes of this year’s exhibtion selection, I congratulate them on their selection of David as judge – an inspired choice that will help our profile globally if she relates to the diversity of our culture and the art made within it. And how can she not? Roll on October!