Grey water

Simon Morris: Folding Water
Two Rooms
16 October -14 November 2009

A dozen stretcher paintings and one wall drawing are currently being presented by Simon Morris in the large downstairs Two Rooms space. As most of us now expect from Morris, the focus in these works is the delicate nuances of brushed on diluted pigment, the textured textiles it is applied to, discreet tonally controlled underpainting over those textiles, and complicated (or simple) linear configurations that often state the time of physical execution within their titles.

The big, gridded up drawing takes up the central end wall. Its thin looping, double-jointed grey line snakes its way (up and down in stacked-up but joined round-cornered rectangles) from the left side to the right - and back again in a reversed alignment. The thin black acrylic wash becomes grey on the white wall and could almost be mottled India Ink but has no sheen. This transparency helps you grasp its pre-planned trajectory quicker through its doubling over earlier sections and through making chosen options unambiguous. Its sense of directional inevitability is more pronounced here than in, say, his recent wall painting at the Adam.

Morris’s mixture of liquid ‘grey’ paint highlights every flick of his brush edge at the corners (their curved lines seem to have been completed after the vertical and horizontal components), every little trail of bubbles or splatter, each minute drop in registered edge through horizontal templates. The line takes on a bodily vulnerability with its exposed building processes acquiring an unexpected metaphorical (let’s say ‘psychological’) dimension.

That ‘expressive’ (you could if pushed, almost say ‘expressionist’) quality is as if his bodily – er 'manual' – processes are linked to the contingencies of his emotional core. Not sweepingly of the arm of course but through wrist movement, within the narrow parallel contours of the moving grey ribbon.

Morris’s square stretcher paintings are less transparent and so less varied in his range of marks and tones found within the line. The yellow and orange trajectories that form very simple mandala-like configurations tend to have a gentle pulse. They are sufficiently opaque to make this throbbing a subtle sensation that can easily be missed. With the other black-lined works the opacity is sooty and matt, and with the thickness of line, solidly robust.

Some unusual inclusions for Morris in this show are a suite of Daily Paintings with thick vertical bands, where he applies paint every day but leaves untouched a strip that he painted the day before. These works are the antithesis of the wall work and so immaculate in their tonal control they look bland, as if seventies décor. Because the band shapes are repeated with no directional variation, there is a rippling sensation horizontally across the deepening tones or intensifying saturation levels, much like curtain fabric.

Personally I like the complicated ‘time’ paintings much more, especially those that traverse the picture plane only to double-back to the edge of origin - for they are brilliantly designed. Morris’s inventiveness here lies in the dropping down (or raising up) of flipped-over returning modules to form a repeatable, intertwined relationship between the two overlapping linear directions. This shrewdly calculated aspect, worked out beforehand on computer - more than the clever incorporation of time of paint application into the title - is what makes these remarkable grids mysterious and memorable.

On Adam's walls

Wall Works
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
8 September – 4 October 2009

The notion of drawing or painting directly onto the gallery wall has been with us for at least forty years now, probably becoming most well known with the practice of Sol Lewitt. For this method, Tina Barton has picked an unusual group of artists to work on the Adam Art Gallery walls, eight individuals some of which you and I would be unlikely to predict: David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison, Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, and Jeena Shin.

For the first half of the show the gallery was opened so that the visiting public could observe the artists constructing their artworks. If you click on the link here you can examine nineteen slides showing samples of the processes involved. (Put your cursor on one image and lefthand click halfway down the righthand edge to change it).

Barton has come up with a terrifically inventive eight-unit combination. The big surprises are Cauchi to install graffiti in the two toilets, Paterson to screen a DVD loop in the dark walled, rubber-floored ‘dungeon’, and Harrison to paint on a large moveable wall by the entrance. Inspired choices.

David Cauchi’s contribution is a revelation – far funnier and classier than what you’d pick up from his blogsite. His use of the orange and green planar surfaces of the Ladies and Gents on which to place withering (often appropriated) comments on idealism, art world participants, liberal democracy and our meaningless lives in general make him a sort of Aztec-obsessed Keith Haring–meets-Emil Cioran, and are so entertaining (though he’s serious in his unrelenting scorn of anything and everything, not trying to get laughs) that his incessant but earnest quips could turn you into a compulsive dunny loiterer.

Reuben Paterson’s black and white film on a pearlescent glittery screen celebrates a queer politic in its furtive, bunkerlike space and bombarding central-state imagery. The flashing, pulsing sequences of kaleidoscopic patterns expand and contract, spin and tilt; hurling you through the screen at unexpected speeds - via different jarring scales - to explore delicate geometric snowflakes and dotty asymmetrical Brownian motion. It is difficult to leave the space because you keep discovering new shapes and tumbling axial alignments you had never previously noticed.

The tunnelling physicality of Paterson’s project has similarities with Kim Pieters’ towering and shimmering wall paintings of cascading pale blue and creamy dribbles on the staircase. These gorgeous surfaces evoke the Sublime and force your eye to rush to the ceiling and its corners, seeking out strategically positioned, negatively-shaped drip-free zones that allow planar respite.

Similarly vertical linear qualities, but much finer and graphic – not overtly painted - are also apparent in Julia Morison’s multi-panelled Myriorama mural that descends down the wall under the Adam’s infamous Athfield-designed floor/ceiling slot. Her columns of 106 portable and reusable panels, each with a gently mottled background overlayed with one of thirty-two repeatable permutations of entangled or parallel lines, drop down or traverse three linked walls, and play off against two thick black parallel bands that bisect the high planes.

Simon Morris and Jeena Shin use only one wall each. With Morris’ looping grid of pale yellow ochre lines you can see where the tone and saturation levels vary, and how – using templates not pencil – the artist has gradually built up the horizontal structure. You can also see how in the first half he has added extra lines, doubling back in reverse to create a denser complexity. The occasional ball within the transparent trajectories indicates where the tips of adjacent lines have overlapped, providing clues to where certain sections of pathway have shared common routes.

Jeena Shin’s large mural features tumbling tangram-like forms of overlapping rectangles and triangles in glossy grey on a matt white plane. The occasional fine ridge shows traces of her process as she modifies the angular geometric rhythms and descending negative gaps. The evanescent forms are getting larger for this artist, becoming more robust, more strident and less delicate.

Michael Harrison’s work on a movable rectangular wall is a comparatively simple composition that shows a small red cat suspended within the larger negative silhouette of an open-mouthed Alsatian where the curved arabesqued contours of the feline tail and canine jaws play off amusingly against each other. It is fascinating to see Harrison deal with this uncharacteristic scale and successfully resolve any formal or technical problems.

Patrick Lundberg’s project involves thinking about the site specific peculiarities of the wall fittings and architectural fittings around the top of the stairs, using a repertoire of generic pencil lines (repeatable with tracing paper) similar to those used by Sol Lewitt. You have to look closely to see them and how Lundberg refers to various wall edges, ceiling planes, bookcase corners, light fittings and banisters.

This show looks excellent now, but I saw it last weekend at the time of the Adam’s Tenth Anniversary Party. For that event Barton had commissioned temporary structures designed and built by second year students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design to be placed inside or next to the installations by the eight artists I’ve just discussed. The result was a political, aesthetic and conceptual disaster, making many of the artists furious that their projects were interfered with at a time when many out-of–town visitors had come to see the show. It was sad to see such curatorial blundering - though thankfully, only short-term.

Switch on machine; pick an option

Select>Effect>Export
Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
25 April - 5 July 2009

The five artists of this show have been selected by Stephen Cleland to elaborate on the similarities between the processes of the human mind and those of machines, and to show some of their common mathematic and mechanical characteristics.

The exhibition takes up most of the gallery yet it is unusually understated – for Te Tuhi anyway. There is plenty of white wall. Heaps. Almost too much. Almost too minimal.

What is interesting is noticing the commonalities between the artworks of these five individuals. How they link up in a ideational circle via certain stylistic qualities: John Lyall’s ten drawings feature linear loops similar to the large blue loops of Simon Morris which are also like the routered lines of D.J.Simpson. Simpson’s use of planar colour and negative space ties in with Rose Nolan’s massive textual mural, and her use of the colour red echoes Sarah Munro’s, who like John Lyall, uses geometrical forms to structure her images.

So, as the title suggests, the artists are like machines for which a variation can be picked out of a range of options. They look at the permutations on tap, and decide. The word ‘effect’ is deliberately loaded – suggesting something trivial or superficial. Chasing an optical buzz, a ‘gee whiz’ component to tickle the audience; a surface layer.

John Lyall’s ten mazelike drawings on drafting film look like something out of Haight Ashbury Zap comix or from a pictograph on a Mayan ruin. He has demonstrated several possibilities. Within these numerals the earlier ‘effects’ are straighter, but as they progress they get curvier and wilder in their flipped back, trippy arabesques. And more fragmented and indecipherable.

With Simon Morris there are many options for his meandering blue line, in terms of how he can cover the wall to make a mural. It can move from left to right only, it can double back on itself, it can overlap earlier loops, its modules can be vertically aligned or horizontal, the density of its patterning can be increased or lessened, and its height up the wall can be varied as desired. What is not flexible is its type of chroma as a ‘blue’, or the number of coats, or the line thickness.





The English artist D.J. Simpson, when he uses a router to cut out the differently thick (and deep) lines from a Formica laminate, often makes the oval or wiggly lines identical. They are like prints, or the results of a repeatable computer programme that controls the blade movement. Only the deeply saturated, glossy, monochromatic colours vary.




In the large gallery where Simon Morris’ blue line painting is located, there is a huge Rose Nolan text work on the opposite wall. Nine gigantic chunky letters that say DIFFICULT are rendered using negative spaces between blocks of bright red. To get the proportions right so that the desired word can be read, Nolan would have to have tested several options in length and height – especially to negotiate around corners and power points to ensure letters remain cohesive. Without them functioning properly the word would be indecipherable.

The two works by Sarah Munro are geometric variations on a theme: the same elements contained within a squashed trapezium (or diamond), and a more stable square. External contours affect internal ones. Altering perimeter shapes changes the three-dimensional edges of the compositions within. The works prod the viewer’s imagination to mentally test other fictional possibilities.

Sophisticated drawings

Works on Paper: Kevin Appel, Joachim Bandau, Frank Gerritiz, Jane Harris, Noel Ivanoff, Simon Morris, Geena Shin
Two Rooms
30 January - 28 February 2009

This is a tightly selected show that uses the whole gallery, with Frank Gerritiz providing some ‘drawings’ in the traditional sense of leaded graphite on paper, and Geena Shin and Kevin Appell creating collages. Joachim Bandou and Jane Harris explore the limitations of watercolour inside demarcated, repeated shapes that overlap – as does Simon Morris with liquid acrylic – while Noel Ivanoff makes ‘paintings’ in a sticky Judy Millarish way, with viscous coloured substance stamped with a grinding disc onto free-hanging sheets of dacron. Only three of the seven artists here are Kiwis.

In this shrewd, elegant and varied exhibition stock is made fresh in a new context. The works interact beautifully, with many cross connections made via similar colours and use of negative shape.

The most obsessively fastidious works are Gerritz’s carefully positioned squares and rectangles. These meticulous black blocks are stacks of dark rippling lines measured into thirds or sixths of the pages’ surface area. The harshness of the precise edges created by this German artist could lacerate your eyeball if you lingered too long over their razor-sharp, geometric contours. The mottled pencil lines seduce with their subtle horizontal wobbling motion and beguiling depth.

Geena Shin’s angular tangram forms are less optically stable, not being anchored with a sense of weight. Their pointy diamond forms seem to flutter and flip across the page, being like Gerritz ultra crisp, and exploiting negative gaps. Carefully pre-planned, these are made with rigorously positioned, glued on, painted card.

Whilst this is clearly an ‘abstraction’ show that examines nuances of surface, it is not only preoccupied with figure-ground relationships of shape or suggested volumetric form. Simon Morris and Noel Ivanoff deal with these, and the concept of process-driven time as well. Both use wormlike shapes that meander across the page, rising and descending - and stopping when they seem about to double back.

Morris’s inventive stencil-based configurations explore a delicate and flat, thick twisting line that snares unexpected but repeated white shapes within its airy looping course. Ivanoff’s line though is much fatter and denser. Because it is created from a printed disc application of slimy coloured pigment it looks telescopic and modelled, like a ventilation tube. It is squeezed into a compressed structure where negative forms cannot be a consideration.

These works have a nice looseness as well: Ivanoff where the squashed paint has oozed out and thickened beyond the confines of the overlapping, pressing circle, and Morris with the occasional flick of dripped paint. British artist Jane Harris capitalises further on such accidents, mixing her watercolour pigments in subtle chromatic combinations and placing them in rows of overlapping elongated ovals so that the drying hues start to separate and form dark surging waves peeking through paler fields.

There is another German artist in this show besides Gerritz, mentioned earlier. Joachim Bandau exploits the properties of diluted black pigment and only that, his overlapping rectangular washes looking like aerial views of stacked up sheets of tinted glass. Each faint rectangle has a thin undulating edge, a tiny line of linear black residue, and the ones in the centre, being positioned over many more layers, are darker and deeper in dramatic depth.

Upstairs the collages by American artist Kevin Appel show us his interest in synthetic cubism and architectural forms. On one wall his pencil drawings of patterned sheltering planes, airily aligned within the branches of trees, amuse with their whimsical inventiveness. On the other, appropriated photographs of landscapes have tent or hut forms inserted, with similarly decorative planes. This floor is in marked contrast to the austerity and lack of ornamentation on the ground floor below. Unlike the other artists, Appel’s work has a celebratory exuberance, a joyfulness in decoration, possibly even prettiness – without getting wild. It is still intrinsically cool.

Summing up, overall the works in this show are strictly controlled - with nothing really too abandoned or remotely frenetic. Yet though there is an emphasis on craft and technique, it somehow sustains interest without drifting into dry exercises or showing off. The visual properties, often fluid in the physicality of the medium, greatly intrigue. In their clever combinations of sensibility, they compel further looking.

[In descending order, the illustrated works above are by Frank Gerritz, Geena Shin, Simon Morris, Noel Ivanoff, Jane Harris, Joachim Bandau and Kevin Appel.]