Superb paintings

Johl Dwyer & Schaeffer Lemalu: Milk waterfall
A Centre for Art
16 March - 3 April 2010

Here we have five paintings by two very different artists in a somewhat small space. Two textured and gestural panels are by Dwyer, one of which is much much bigger than all the others. Lemalu’s works on the other hand are ‘minimal’, and all about delicate and faintly detectable colour fields.

Lemalu’s three small ‘white’ canvases emphasise concentrated perception, and are subtle indeed. So much so that the degree of soft natural light through the Wellesley St window in the afternoon seems to be crucial to grasping the processes behind their production, as does where you stand to one side. He has applied gouache to their surfaces and later washed it off. In fact he has soaked it in water, scrubbed it off and then restretched the canvas. Sometimes he has put a more paint on its surface a second time, and left it.

His colour is so understated that you wonder if it is an afterimage you are looking at. Some floating yellow blur, a hint of a chromatic smudge that comes perhaps from you looking at something dark or saturated. A couple of the gallery walls are a wooden ochre brown, and that affects your perception of the two works’ overall rectangular surface. They seem tonally at odds with the work on a white wall.

Dwyer’s paintings are extremely different from Lemalu’s in their wild tactility and traces of dramatic hand movement. They incorporate glued-on rectangles of painted canvas or plastic vinyl, and lots of scraped on modeling paste that has left ripped horizontal ‘gashes’ as you might often see in a Gerhard Richter painting. The work is very physically layered, with tiny dark Christopher Woolish squiggles, sweeps of sprayed colour and intricate David Reed smears. One work is quite sculptural, with thick zigzagging lines of solid blue paint squeezed straight out of the tube.

These two artists make a great combination because the juxtaposition of such opposite methodologies is so refreshing. This dynamic creates an exceptionally exciting painting show, and probably the best show I’ve seen at ACFA. It may be one of the best ever local painting shows in Auckland as well.

Witty group exhibition

'I try to help them give form to the many options available to them.'
Group show: James Deutsher (Au), Kel Glaister (Au), Simon Glaister (NZ), Michael Stevenson (NZ/Germany)
Curated by Daniel Munn
ACFA
11 February - 20 February 2010

Last August Daniel Munn had an exhibition (performance and installation) at Newcall, accompanied by a film by Sean Grattan - and now he is doing something quite different, wearing the hat of a curator and presenting a four person exhibition in the small ACFA space on the second floor of the Elliott St Apartments.

The lovely title of this show declares his purpose: the role of co-ordinator to implement the artists’ intentions so they become manifest – though it is strange. The heading sheds no light on the different practices as such – more unabashedly showcasing the activities of the organiser. What is clear though from the work is that Munn has considerable talent as a curator. This is an excellent show of conceptual sculpture, work that is rich in poetic /semantic resonances that mentally engages the viewer long after they have visited ACFA.

The two Glaister artists (one Kiwi, the other Australian) apparently are not related. Kel is a master of understatement, one who provides the seed of an idea that gets under your skin and grows. Her two dice lying on a window sill have had their faces sanded so that the number dots have been removed. These tiny white plastic cubes are not perfect in their planar alignment, being slightly crooked with bent edges. They look a little like blocks of pool table chalk used for rubbing on cue tips.

With no numbers they speak of function being stripped and chance becoming paradoxically more embedded than ever. They are now ultra mysterious, super enigmatic – more open to circumstantial interpretation. The ‘vandalism’ has freed them from purpose.

Her other contribution, Sitting on a power sander, is a beautifully dressed, thick, pale plank lying on the floor with a circular indentation between its parallel edges. The soft dishlike hollow gives the narrow wooden sculpture – by virtue of its suggestive title – a sense of the intimate and bodily. It seems to reference rectal pleasures. Here the means of production, via a clever albeit vulgar heading, wittily encloses the form of the final object in an unexpectedly provocative, but nevertheless visually resolved, interpretation.

There are also two works by Simon Glaister. One is a densely worded grey poster in a stack, from which you can help yourself. You can read its text if you click on the middle image above. It is about paying the artist half the profit if you intend to sell it, but its wording is a little convoluted and clunky.

That textual struggle and clumsiness is even more evident in Glaister’s wall work, a set of loan agreements where he lends a hundred dollars to various borrowers, at 15 per cent yearly interest, to be paid back in five years. The time and place of each negotiation (often in public spaces) is scribbled in biro over the lefthand corner of each laserprinted contract, and each is signed by both parties with added blue fingerprints from the borrowers. There is also an extra contract cleverly offering Glaister’s services to any gallery visitor in urgent need of a hundred dollar bill.

Some of the garbled wording here is unintendedly funny, though Glaister might be satirising legalese, as in this description of the security needed as collateral: any materials, substances, and feelings with which the borrower associates their personal and specific notion of home not owned by any other party.

Despite their laborious wording, Glaister’s agreements look interesting on the ACFA wall with their embossed paper (entitled ‘Money For Nothing’), formal typeface and smudgy blue inks. The work holds your attention as you try to decipher it. You also wonder that as five years is a long time, he might find it harder to get his money back (and profits) than he realises. Perhaps the recipients really are getting money for nothing and that is Glaister’s point – and a source of the work’s fascination. That speculation.

Berlin-based New Zealander Michael Stevenson has another language work, accompanied by an image of a book cover. His text tells the story of a Spanish stone carver and hermit who lived on the coat of Galicia. Manfred (‘Man’) Gnädinger had his work, garden and dwelling destroyed in November 2002 by the catastrophic oil spill from the sunken tanker Prestige, and he apparently died of depression within weeks. A collection of books from his personal library called The Library of Man has been exhibited in Antwerp and Stevenson is obviously moved by the tragic story. The tale is not a fabrication like his fictitious video covers of the mid-nineties, but well known – and the point obviously is the vulnerability of all people to eco disasters, even artists living in isolation.

Melbourne artist James Deutsher has a humorous low-tech homage to famous Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata (1934 -1991), referencing a boxlike chair he made of laminated glass sheets. Deutsher’s sculpture is made of sheets of translucent corrugated plastic stuck to the sides of a low metal stool. Like Stevenson’s contribution, the work links to a particular person’s life story and resonates against the two Glaister artists, the ambiguous confusion of their relationship, and the personal and more speculative nature of their contributions. The exhibition thematically links up, with the ‘sander’ work connecting (via bottoms) to the chair and the dice connecting (via coincidence) to the oil disaster text. A clever, beautifully constructed show.

In descending order, the images are of artworks by Kel Glaister (2), Simon Glaister, Michael Stevenson and James Deutsher. Thanks for the installation shots, Daniel Munn.

Almost forgettable

Milli Jannides: Keeping Still
A Centre For Art
9 December - 24 December 2009 (and Jan and Feb by appointment)

Five small oil-painted canvases are currently displayed by Milli Jannides in the small ACFA space: five semi-figurative works on five walls.

Most of these are unresolved – works that are inappropriately small in relation to their marks, not cohesive as a group, and with their turps-washed underpainting not integrated with the fuller-bodied top layers. Many seem abandoned in mid-process, as if the artist has given up seeking any image that has compelling power.

Some contain whispers of famous artists Jannides seems to have been thinking about: Keeping Still has trees that speak of Mondrian, Thickets of Diebenkorn’s parks, Caresses of Howard Hodgkin. There is no decisive voice here; in fact the show oozes indecision and wavering – no clear purpose in the image structure. No consistent pattern of thought.

The best work is The Magician’s Assistant where we see bars of golden sunlight raking across a centrally positioned, wooden staircase. The ceiling is converted into a grey, vertically descending wall and brown walls on either side, when hit by the sun, seem to strangely dissolve into floors. Nevertheless, this roughly executed work intrigues with its warm glowing light. An exception.

Images courtesy of the artist and ACFA

Lemalu @ ACFA

Schaeffer Lemalu: Bobby Feet Blue
A Centre For Art
11 November - 5 December 2009

Schaeffer Lemalu is a Samoan painter whose practice in abstraction involves precise tonal control (difficult to do because when acrylics dry their tones alter) or the use of delicate washes combined with undercoats. Usually the works consist of three or two vertical monochromatic bands – sometimes there are two, but with a horizontal section underneath.

In this show of six smallish canvases, the works vary between high colour saturation and watery, very faint desaturation. Two consist of brightly intense chroma, two are fainter, and the others are extremely understated. Lemalu’s application is often liquidly tactile and painterly. It is not fastidious. Sometimes fingers are used; other times edges of pooled concentrated colour form when he has raised the wet canvas up from a horizontal position to that of vertical.

The nature of super-subtle optical practices is that they can become too minimal - forgettable and boring - if there is no hook (like a tune) to remember them by. That ‘hook’ usually involves bodily interaction: some visceral (as opposed to cerebral) response. The scale needs a tuned-up boost to engage. Otherwise they stay bland – an empty exercise.

Therefore many of these paintings, not the bright ones, remain insipid and a little twee. Their size limits them, for their fields of juxtaposed diluted colour need extension. They stay slightly anaemic and need more body, requiring a little injection of bobby feet blue so they can match the great title.

Images courtesy of the artist and ACFA.

Repression or indulgence?

Clara Chon: Repression Revisited
A Centre For Art
16 July - 1 August 2009

Let’s start by having me set the scene, for this is one of those ‘conceptual’ projects where the imagination is the main material. Chon’s ‘work’ consists of ‘sketches’ for a One Act play called Photoshop Layaz: an ongoing and partly fictitious play in many episodes, written by Tim Coster and Ash Kilmartin.

In the ACFA exhibiting space the props are strictly minimal. Only three.

On one wall there is an unfolded sheet of blank brown paper. A grid of nine sections demarcated by creases. On the floor is a bare foam mattress on a beat up divan frame with castors. It is in a pink cover that matches the pink underpainting around the entrance to the ACFA studio/office. And on the opposite wall is a pinned up painted canvas depicting the back of a head of strawberry blonde hair. No face, neck or shoulders. Could be a wig. Could be a fetishist’s fantasy.

More important than any of these is a transcript of the play on the window ledge that you can help yourself to. It's jumbled. Scenes are printed in random order, Scene Four is split between the action and the description of the set, as is another with no number at all that has two alternative stage directions. And there is no dialogue - only laughter.

The dozen characters (some of which are intact families, romantic couples, and groups within the audience) act out a ‘plot’ which as the title implies, focuses on innuendo, aided by the presence of course of the mattress. Most of them are easily identifiable Auckland artists – visual and sound, or art writers – interacting in various Auckland clubs, bars and restaurants.

What of Chon’s psychoanalytic title? It tells us that these aren’t in fact sketches at all, but the remnants of a play once completed - but now with the embarrassing meaty bits pushed into hiding, leaving only the acceptable shuffled bones of a skeleton. The content pertaining to the handful of props in the ACFA space has been collectively censored. Those meagre props were once part of a larger, more lavish stage production.

Or ignoring that possibility, what if a work could be developed beyond these putative ‘sketches’ - by mentally correcting the sequencing and putting in dialogue? I can’t imagine it being particularly interesting as an ‘unrepressed’ project. Would it be less insular and giggly, less an inhouse clique of pals - all twenty-somethings - absorbed only with themselves?

Not that older generations of artists would be any different. It’s the nature of so much art practice right now to be preoccupied with its own social matrix. Celebrating its own perpetuation. Occasionally also critiquing it.

It is possible Coster, Kilmartin and Chon have a satirical intention - that they are lampooning a certain art coterie, or the idea of repression itself. Hard to say; they could also be boasting. Whatever the case the short transcript is a visually attractive little document, and fun to think about – up to a point. It’s probably not worth an arduous hike up to ACFA solely to retrieve a copy, but if you are going to the Civic or to SKYCITY for a Festival movie, and happen to be passing, you can always drop in.

Not good

Johl Dwyer and Fatigue
ACFA
27 May - 13 June 2009

What can one make of this? A show of indifferently displayed, dull, wacko, trippy-dippy stoner art – but whoa!...maybe that is too harsh. Cruel and irresponsible even? Yet to be clinical, Dwyer’s (I think unfortunate) exhibition seems too incohesive to be anything other than bi-polar. However I am assuming they are not from such a cognitively disadvantaged person. That being in ACFA there is some sort of strategic reason behind their disarray.

Out of forty odd collages on unframed bits of cardboard, made of torn wrapping paper, pencil and ink drawings, and daubs from experiments with smeared paint, maybe six or seven are worth looking at, and most of those are placed inaccessibly high near the ceiling or down by the skirting board.

The work seems to come from a pharmaceutically imbibing practice, which with talented people might remotely lead eventually to some positive outcomes. You can’t analyse the process as you would with an innovative artist like Dan Arps and look for patterns. These ‘spaced–out’ collages are tired cliché. A stack of sixties Zap comics would be less shambolic, and considerably more informative.

Fatigue’s videos are a little better – if you can see them at all in the glaring daylight, and are entertained by images of people walking down the street in three second bursts, repeated six times.

I usually have huge respect for ACFA projects but here I’m baffled. They’ve lost the plot.

A planetary object

Chris Cudby: Smooth places
A Centre for Art
17 April – 2 May 2009

Chris Cudby is an artist-musician now presenting a sculptural installation in the new ACFA space in Wellesley St.

Cudby has prepared the room so it is dominated by a complex tower sitting on a base of two chrome scissor-legged stools. Using a set of frail wooden platforms the sculpture is a spindly slatted structure that incorporates a very large pot plant raised up high. There are other things too in the space. On one wall is a computer abstracted aerial photo, on another are some delicate pen and ink cartoons and a watercolour, on a low stool is a glowing red, plastic pyramid lamp (apparently alluding to a Gary Numan LP sleeve), and a black sixties ‘sci-fi’ amp and speakers (all curved pyramids) can be seen on the window ledge, playing soft music from a (now) antiquated i-pod. There are lots of formal interconnections between the understated drawings, pyramidal objects and stacked-up sculpture.

The tall plant (I think it’s an azalea) in the complex vertical sculpture is in a long, white, triangular slab pot. It has several elegantly braided, narrow trunks. The projecting platforms and structures, horizontally lined with thick brown cardboard, hold three types of object. One is an open LCD ‘book’ showing a loop of the artist (I’m guessing here, never met him) blowing cobwebs off the braided plant trunks. Another is a very small revolving turntable on which is a delicately dotted, plastic airlines ‘glass’ - filled with sparkling mineral water. A third, high up, is an orange globe of the world on a stand - though not actually ‘on’ a stand but hovering in mid-air, held in space by unseen magnets. The ball and ‘stand’ are positioned out above the leaves.

To enjoy this installation, you don’t need an underlying narrative; it works so well formally with many interconnecting parallel levels. The show has an appealing airy, linear quality that repudiates weighty density - a lightness of touch. Yet there clearly is a theme behind this arrangement of various elements – that of global and ecological issues. The images on the walls, the aerated water in the turning glass, the hovering globe, the tree, the image of its being cared for – all focus on planetary concerns. It is conventional subject matter for sure but it is done with considerable inventiveness and panache. This is a classy presentation that succeeds in spite of its theme, and not because of it.

Warm but not cosy

Richard Francis: Warmth
A Centre For Art (Elliott St Apartments, Level 2, Rm.206)
25 March - 11 April 2009

Richard Francis is a Kiwi sonic artist, one of two who recently performed in Broken Fall, in St. Paul St. This ACFA show is quite different from that live work - except I do remember he crumpled some dry paper into a microphone and recorded it, and that’s a good connection. Here he presents a vinyl record (33 in size but 45 in speed) on a battered turntable with adjustable amp and a couple of old black speakers. It’s up on a table. You play it and listen when you arrive.

The recording is a one sided pressed disc documenting another one sided blank disc being played on another turntable. You can hear lots of static and increased crackling and low rumbles over its six minute duration, and a certain amount of Wellesley St. car noise seeping in as well.

Each time you play it the needle wears the grooves down a little more. The intensity of the static noise and various electronic resonances alters to increase next time.

I’m not sure how interesting Francis’s project is as sonic art, though I’m delighted ACFA has presented this so I can think about it. Maybe repeated playing causes it to grow on you as you pick up more layers of eggshell crunching and new frequencies. I do like the idea of making such a recording. However whether many would listen to it for pleasure or genuine interest, I don’t know.

The sounds though are hard to ignore: they never could be background. Though not loud they nevertheless are ‘in your face.’ They put you on the spot and are confrontational. But maybe that is a misreading. Maybe some find them soothing and uplifting, even exuberant. Maybe.

The title comes from the often stated belief than vinyl makes a warmer sound than digital, that CDs sound icier. I’m not convinced about this ‘temperature’ claim myself, though I recognise CDs have a much lower frequency range and recorded music has suffered for that. A thoughtful heading for an unusual aural experience.

Free-falling, while looking for your parachute

Broken Fall
Newcall, A Center For Art (temporarily in St Paul St, Gallery 2)
10 February - 28 February 2009 (Newcall)
10 - 13 February 2009 (ACFA)

Broken Fall is a clever idea developed by AUT lecturer Jan Bryant, of asking three Melbourne artists (Katie Lee, Lou Hubbard and Susan Jacob) to come over to Auckland and adapt their practices for two spaces in that city. To get a response to this recontextualisation she has also asked two New Zealand sound artists (Tim Coster and Richard Francis) to use the Australian shows to generate new works to be performed in the exhibition spaces.

Of the Australian displays, Lou Hubbard’s projected video grids are the most physically imposing. She uses the matrix as a structure while also slyly undermining it. At ACFA she has a group of seven toy Japanese soccer players, each attached to a hexagonal plastic section of playing field, standing in a sink so that they collapse and separate when the tap is turned on.

Her Newcall work is more interesting, wittily comparing the scaling of a fish with the scraping off of film from gambling cards, and in opposition, the manual completion of a grid by crossword. These actions are performed by an elderly woman who in one of the grid's four rectangles, stands alone in a corner of the room. The tension between the actions of her hands and her impassive face holds your interest.

The most intriguing work in the Newcall exhibition is Susan Jacob’s dried up Christmas tree projecting from the inner side of a door leaning into a wall. It has its branches reversed so they point up instead of down. Its subtle transformation draws you back to look at how Jacob broke off and realigned the various twigs, something that is not obvious.

This sculpture is not tightly connected to Jacob’s working drawings (at ACFA) and drives home the point that good art is often impulsive and about play, about fooling with materials – where hands are almost separated from the mind.

Of Katie Lee’s two videos (and related horizontal floor sculpture), the ACFA one without her figure balancing in a square taped to the floor is the more successful. The time lapse photography of the room’s flickering sepia light and artist’s absent body makes it a compelling – albeit austere – spatial statement that effectively references her works in the other space. The Newcall video though, intrigues more through being set in a low cupboard, than through the content of its moving images.

How did the Kiwi sound artists respond? They differed in that Coster used recordings of the Australians installing their projects as a starting point, and Francis experimented with the ACFA space itself and a variety of sound sources (modulator, computer, and portable objects).

Of the two live gigs, Coster’s thirty minute performance was the more dramatic and satisfying – less monotonous. His build up of an even drone of looping rumbling hums, delicate fluttery rattles and hissing wipes maintained a consistent tension until about five minutes before the end. Then suddenly samples of a sweeping operatic aria emerged, fused with peals of laughter and the occasional squawk. What was dry and abstract suddenly erupted into unexpected lyricism and humour, a poignant flowering that just as abruptly stopped – leaving the audience stunned and wishing for more.

Top three images from Newcall Gallery, bottom three from ACFA at AUT, then invite.

Three images

Natasha Cantwell: Sopstationen
A Centre For Art, Level 3, Achilles House
1 October - 18 October 2008

We have here a very tidy show from Natasha Cantwell of three C-type photographs, framed in brown wide wooden frames, under glass. They are together on one wall, and look good. I’m not sure how they fit in as ‘alternative avenues of representation’ as stated in the CFA credo, but the work looks very considered. And there seems to be a conceptual structure going on.

The title work shows a disturbed hawk about to take off from a dried branch, a taxidermied bird apparently in a museum diorama. Yet on our left we see part of a deer antler. We check to see if the bird’s branch is an antler too. The similarities raise doubts about what we are looking at.

Harriet’s Kitchen is an image of a dingy narrow kitchenette that is formally symmetrical, with a white oven surrounded by green tiles and shelving. Above it is a standard sentimental reproduced print, framed, of a river with snowy banks, wintery trees and fading yellow sky. Its lacklustre mood matches the kitchen in decrepit pathos, providing a strange sort of self-referencing wit.

Cantwell’s third image, Valentines Day, is sugary sweet but creepy. On its right is a pretty, sharpened pencil with vertical pink stripes gong down its sides. To its left is a large seal-lock plastic bag containing five extracted molars, while near its upper righthand corner is a small fragment of paper on which is written over a drawn heart, the word ‘mau mau’ – referencing the Kenyan anti-colonial military organisation greatly feared by the British. Therefore the teeth can be linked to torture and atrocities, or to the lolly coloured, edible looking pencil that wrote the words - cavities, dentist and more torture.

This is smart, highly nuanced work, but three images though is barely a taste. Hopefully more will appear soon.

Hide and seek

I close my eyes and count to ten
Selina Foote
A Centre For Art, Achilles House
30 July – 17 August 2007

Selina Foote’s paintings at first take appear to be interested in kitsch or sentimental subject matter, a distant cousin of say the paintings of Robin Neate or Saskia Leek. That impression is mistaken for the work really is about the processes of obscuring and revealing, covering and exposing. The depicted subject matter itself is not that crucial.

Foote’s painterly, not over-finished images are characterised by a soft palette where the chroma has a greyish tinge. Saturation is skilfully muted and kept under control. No intense colouration leaps out at you.

Harriet Wild, in a natty little essay positioned on the wall of the corridor outside the ACFA entrance, talks about Foote’s five small canvases as demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between realism and abstraction. However symbiosis is a partnership between equals and in Foote’s work, realism dominates. The oblique geometrical components seem tangential to something else.

One painting shows a demonstration at a karate tournament where one competitor with a high kick smashes a solid panel held by two men. The bottom sixth of the image is obscured by a semi-opaque triangle blocking out details of the scene. Another of a Christmas tree has two large triangles covering portions of the image on both sides. One other work, a portrait, is partially covered by flat, pale, mauve twigs sprouting all over its lower and peripheral facial features.

Two others, Monster and Santa, use attrition. They feature a sanding off some of the pigment surface, a picking away of selected encrustations of paint, or hiding large areas of the body or face behind dry-brushed, dappled leaves or mottled sandy textures. These ‘subtractive’ works are not abstract but surreal and suggestive. And disturbingly nightmarish. Creepy little paintings that initially seem sweet but which hint at deformity. A bit like very early Francus Bacon they are far superior to the ones with overlaid geometry, and show Foote to be a skilled image maker. Someone to watch.

Woeful space for woeful paintings

Jokes With Strangers: Denys Watkins, Roman Mitch, Garth Steeper, Milli Jannides, Sam Rountree Williams
Curated by Sam Rountree Williams and Patrick Lundberg
A Centre For Art (Level 3, R5, Achilles House)
10 July - 26 July 2008

Here is a problem to be considered. Experimental art spaces like ACFA and R103, collectives set up by young and emerging artists, usually rent space from venues like Achilles House, areas originally designed to be used as offices. These premises are perfect for parties, performances, sound works, moving image and some sorts of installation and sculpture – but for paintings and drawings, their walls invariably are an abysmal disaster. If such works are not shown in pristine circumstances, in a properly prepared environs with clean (usually) white walls and good lighting, their presentation ends up looking appalling. They end up not being taken seriously as items for contemplation and thoughtful debate. They suffer a resistance even before their own individual attributes are looked at and discussed. They become a joke.

So with the title of this show, one assumes the ‘strangers’ are the handful of gallery visitors the artists and curators don’t happen to know. The ‘jokes’ are not intended, I’m sure, to be laughable works in the sense that I’ve explained above. No artist wants their endeavours to be rudely mocked. So assuming that, perhaps these paintings – even in a ‘proper’ gallery – are actually intended to be jocular…er you know…designed to raise a smile.

Putting aside the fact that only two of the five works really make it (and one of these almost accidentally), let’s look for wit in all of them. Take the title as a literal thematic statement and look for humour or clever paradox.

First of all the two competent paintings in the show, by Denys Watkins and Roman Mitch: it was good to spend time poring over their imagery and thinking about spatial organisation. In Watkins' work, the sensitively undulating contours of his shapes, plus the skilled underpainting and manipulation of temperature in the hues, made it easily the most sophisticated item in the show. Not witty particularly, just extremely classy. A wonderful, beautifully considered object that makes you wonder why an artist of Watkins’ calibre bothered to contribute. Leaning on a window ledge, the placement of the work insulted the intelligence of its creator.

Roman Mitch’s black and white painting on a hanging piece of paper slowly grows on you, despite its scruffiness and shambolic presentation. Its geometrical configuration experimented with Alberslike internally receding planes, with an opened-out box turning into a sort of chair. The lids became its seat, backrest and legs and teased the viewer with its ambiguities.

Garth Steeper’s sort of ‘realism’ was a sentimental portrait with a corny narrative. It used humour with the reflection from a bloody steak (on a plate on the table) casting a rosy glow over the large face of a girl about to devour it. A half-clever idea in a roughly made work that only partially hinted at irony.

Sam Rountree Williams’ painting, like Steeper’s, avoided finesse. It seemed to be a strange pun on heavenly bodies: a glowing sun in front of a painted, cross-sectioned medical diagram of post-coital male and female bodies. Very oblique but somehow getting its point across. Just.

One suspected that the fact that Milli Jannides’ painting of rippling waves was one hundred per cent serious, was a joke in itself created by the context of this show and the other works around it. For this exhibition, single selections from individual artists were inadequate. By themselves they remained isolated. There was little conceptual conversation between works, no vibrant thematic argument going on. The paintings were so totally different, it was like five untranslatable languages all speaking loudly at once in this very small room.

Art laboratory

Alexandra Savtchenko: Thought Forms
Tahi Moore: Into the blue M. Hulot’s Holiday
A Centre For Art, Room 5, Third Floor, Achilles House
18 June - 5 July 2008

This show of Savtchenko’s carries on themes explored by the work she has in ARTSPACE right now and what she recently exhibited at Newcall Gallery.

The Newcall Gallery work teased the memory of the viewer, their knowledge of art history and what the exhibited copied painting might be, and the ARTSPACE work is in two parts, widely separated across town but both seen in the venue –though not simultaneously.

In the Centre For Art space Savtchenko exploits your memory of the invitation, which has two photos of hands moulding red clay into balls. The actual exhibit is a bucket of water and two sealed plastic bags of bulk clay. Written on one of the bags is ‘Red Sculpture’. This is either an invitation for the visitor to make the work for themselves, or else about mental picturing. The latter in the Savtchenko’s context, is more likely. Like the incomplete Newcall building sign, she is asking you to imagine. She is examining the potential of the material, looking at latent transmutations of clay as substance.

Tucked into one corner of the space (it’s a tiny room) is a small screen showing a recent film by Tahi Moore. It is two films superimposed together, the movies being Into the Blue (2005), a John Stockwell thriller, and the Jacques Tati comedy classic, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Moore has combined two separate genres made 55 years apart in two different countries.

When you watch (there is no sound) the narratives start to blend as you get confused about the people and elements in the parallel plots. Though one film is in black and white and the other in colour, when superimposed the Hollywood colour looks bleached, merging with the pallid greys of the older French film. The intermingling creates a new hybrid storyline as you start to manufacture new connections.

Because standing in front of Moore’s film for the whole screening is an ordeal for most, you can see some of it, go downstairs to the first floor and check out the Room 103 exhibitions, and then wander back to see some more if you wish. You can dip into the screening at any point anytime. The two films start together.

Auckland is very lucky to have such new experimental artist-run spaces like this Centre and Newcall Gallery, where projects can be tested. Exciting times.