Moving and disintegrating images

7:5 (seven films by five artists)
Two Rooms
19 August - 9 September 2009

This group show (now over) downstairs at Two Rooms featured short films - sometimes loops - by Clinton Watkins, Gregory Bennett, Judy Darragh, Dorota Mytych and Alex Monteith.

Monteith had the advantage of having the video room out the back all to herself, showing a work previously seen at St. Paul St of different Moto-X riders making tracks up and down a huge dune at Ahipara - as if it were a massive sheet of finely grained drawing paper. With Monteith the whining crackling staccato of the engines was a big component of the pleasure (and humour) she provided, along with three quarter angle photography that could almost be aerial.

Gregory Bennett’s animated films often seem to illustrate some futuristic theme where solitary individuals no longer exist, humans being only capable of moving in unison - like ants that share a common mind. His recent work is now more concerned with simple geometry than it was previously when it was more narrative-based. Densely packed rings of humanoids move their limbs and torsos in co-ordinated unison, opening and closing, like an awakening bud. Bennett is really a choreographer of digital dance, a designer of beautiful (but simple) communal actions.

Clinton Watkins’ slow moving loops of a galloping horse and swinging light shade hypnotically caressed your retinas, while teasing you into searching for the minute jump where each cycle restarted. The gentle pulse from the rocking light, and the flickering space between flailing equine limbs and distant background, held your interest - keeping you from leaving.

Judy Darragh’s video of 365 daily ‘Rorschach tests’ of symmetrically patterned, coloured ink drawings, were a little like Julia Morison’s erotic ink folds (seen in the second most recent Auckland Triennial) but less vaginal and more like butterflies. They had a horizontal, not vertical, format, and were made after giving birth to a child. Darragh’s metaphor of a butterfly thus seemed appropriate. The light of these delicately transparent drawings became particularly intense when enlarged and converted to video, causing the chromatic saturation of the ink to seem to fade. It was a clever idea to put them in a slowly morphing sequence.

The theme of metamorphosis was also apparent in Polish artist Dorota Mytych’s spectacular videos of images made of tea leaves. These, after a stationary period, then became scattered as if blown by a large fan. Though an obvious reference to the transience of existence, her fleeting portraits and figures also alluded to the fortunes of the planet, grim augurs for our species’ future.

Darragh at Two Rooms

Judy Darragh: Studio of exhaustion for diligent service
Two Rooms
3 July - 1 August 2009

The nine works Judy Darragh presents in this show make excellent use of the generous downstairs Two Rooms space: lots of air around each item and a clever division down the middle that lines up two plinths (each half the stud height) to mimic the two central columns.

As a colourist Darragh’s chromatic combinations in her wall and floor works often are too brash, especially with her use of fluoro, or with too many hues. She succeeds therefore when the palette is dead simple. So in this show it is the stained wooden pieces with no applied colour that are the more intriguing – lathed column forms mixed with squelchily glued-on animal carvings, corkscrews, candlesticks and furniture. Between the joins the hokey-pokey toffeelike glue oozes down the sides.

In the middle, two wooden lathed champagne bottles on the white plinths appear pierced by copper bullets. The stands below the ‘wounds’ are splashed with yellow ochre ‘blood’. These trickling marks could also be urine from exuberant hunters. The copious quantities of alcohol they seem to have quaffed could be connected to the hundreds of pinned up, paint-dunked wine corks spread like an angry swam stretched out across the long wall.

Near the wall by the gallery entrance are two stacked up silver painted cabinets crammed with amusingly tawdry goblets, made from plastic bottles and covered with thin silver tape. Like the corks and wooden bottles these pantomime-like props allude to excessive consumption; they are a comment on waste. Yet they have a pathos, a sense of being tragic as well as didactic and funny. Also amusing is a stiffened, brightly coloured Turkish rug, rearing up high off the floor as if it was a Cobra. For a simple idea this unexpected sculptural form has great impact.

Near the opposite corner of the room is a pink banner projecting out from the wall, hung high and attached to an ochre ‘flowing paint’ cut-out canvas. Like the rearing rug, this is very simple, but the two colours combine well with the oddly shaped hanging and shredded looking 'brushmarked' material. So whilst I normally dislike Darragh’s colour combinations, this one turns my knees to jelly. I like the controlled chromatic restraint (contextually the fluoro works), the nutty but mesmerising shapes, their peculiar trickling down associations. It's a strangely lopsided, badly shredded, candy coloured flag seemingly pulled in two directions by competing vectors of gravity. My favourite.