Topsy-turvy

Dare. Truth. Promise
St. Paul St Gallery 3 (39 Symonds St)
29 July - 1 August 2009

This exhibition is based on the supposition that there is no separation between an art work and the contextual envelope made from the history of the artist, their inspirations, background circumstances and her or his intentions.

In fact it goes further. It says lets have six artists prepare six catalogue entries for a show, record them reading those six statements, play it in a designed space with a sound system, and make that a ‘collaborative’ sound work. Forget the original impetus being discussed - which was video, painted or collage artworks. Let the auxiliary replace the primary. The footnotes replace the essay. Descriptive spoken words are substituted for the initially envisaged art experiences.

In my view, this is hogwash. Pure piffle. That there is a state of infinite regress here where research and mental imagining becomes an ever-receding surrogate for a finite physical construction.

I’m not denying that the six recordings are a collaborative artwork because if artists choose to make such declarative claims involving ontological status, who am I to contradict them? I will say though that the work is conceptually and experientially poor. That Natalia Birgel, Alan Joy, Sam Leitch, Lee McGarva, Seilala Sini and Vaimaila Urale have wasted their energies doing this. They’ve been sidetracked when they should have concentrated on their original non-aural projects, perhaps constructing them separately in isolation.

Thank you to the artists for the images.

Gallery Three, AUT

Bypassed territory
St. Paul St, Gallery Three (39 Symonds St)
25 - 27 June 2009

This, the third exhibiting space of St. Paul St, just round the corner from the other two, less raw, international venues, is getting more usage now from AUT’s senior students – though only for short bursts. Last week six 3rd year BVA candidates presented an excellent sampling exhibition of their respective interests - six very different individuals showing floor sculpture, photographs, a wall drawing, wall sculptures of folded prints and one screened wall painting.

Emma Fraser’s large wall painting ‘Noise” had overtones of Rauschenberg’s ink-transfer and silk-screened works. Her array of screened on overlapping blotches, squiggles and smudged stains, that then had added fine ink lines delineating chosen contours, dominated a large wall with its delicate greys and scrubbed browns. This small mural alluded to decay and attrition and not narratives with recognisable images, and was by far the largest two-dimensional work in the gallery.

Lyn Guinibert’s cluster of latex-stiffened beach towels and tablecloths on the floor was intriguing for each unit was like an unopened umbrella, the fabric being left to harden while draped over the tip of a pole. Inert when single and isolated, they became active as a group, suggesting strange angular birds or shattered geological forms. This very simple idea seemed rich in explorative possibilities. It will be interesting to see where Guinibert takes it.

Printmaking methodology and folded paper sculpture were blended together by Emma Macfarlane. One work had the partially cut out but now folded, box element still attached to the original large sheet along its bottom edge, so that the two were still one work on the wall – a less sophisticated version of the eighties snipped-and-folded whiteware sculpture by British artist Bill Woodrow. The other was a grid of 9 x 7 paper boxes with an identically embossed formation on each frontal plane. The grid was a little dull; repetition for its own sake without a knowing tension. The con-joined sheet/folded form variation had more resonances.

Natasha Pearl’s photographs used expired film as strategy, aspiring to remind ‘us of a practice once dependent on scientific process and light sensitive paper.’ There was a pathos about her conscious embracing of raggedy imperfection, with images out of focus, having odd depths of field, inconstant light levels and sudden horizontal changes of hue. Without going too far the other way and lashing out at current digital ‘slickness’, these images of bush paths cleverly mixed the ‘formlessness’ of dense vegetation with a methodology that examines decay. They didn’t seem to be about nostalgia, more a wry acceptance of the history of the camera.

This gallery space seems to have been tidied up considerably since I last visited, and it has some unusual features like raw concrete columns that give it personality. Caitlyn Porteous did a wall drawing that wrapped its patterned web around a corner. Her silver-lined drawing of linked hexagonal and triangular shapes worked well overall but it could just as effectively have been on any flat wall, or better still modified for a column. As a flowing crystalline bed it didn’t have an architectural dialogue with its own site; no morphological nuance with its right-angled cross-section.

Thomas Stewart’s two works interacted in the architecture as foils. One was an installation that cleverly used the internal space by creating the skeletal framework of a room, and the other was a self-reflexive sculpture that used the space outside the gallery in the street to depict its own internal image to passers by. Stewart’s installation had a flat undulating plaster square on the floor that reflected similar oblong slabs stacked in a vertical wooden box in the wall frame. The simple box form was repeated in the second work with a larger version covering a corner window and facing out into the street. From outside the contents were revealed through the glass as a mini wall holding a mini box. It depicted itself.

Hopefully AUT will do more shows like this with senior students - and perhaps have an ongoing dialogue with Elam’s George Fraser Gallery, with longer exhibiting periods. The quality of the room is very apparent now, the location very accessible. It just needs a consistently maintained programme.

Many thanks to the artists for their images. From top to bottom, the works are by Fraser, Guinibert, Macfarlane, Pearl, Porteous and Stewart.

Disappointing

I’ve wandered much of late: Vivien Masters, Olga Tuzhba, Chloe King, Jennifer Mayer, Philip Good
St. Paul St 3 (in Symonds St)
AUT
13 – 16 August 2008

This is a small group show of final year AUT students doing BVAs, in a space that has been recently acquired by the institution. It is currently in a makeshift state but hopefully St. Paul St 3 will soon be brought up to scratch with proper lights and lining - so it can compete with other university galleries around town, like say the George Fraser.

It’s a very uneven exhibition. Jennifer Mayer’s photographs, organised in two sets of three, owe a lot to Sam Taylor Wood, but at least they look like a substantial body. Some other artists, like Olga Tuzhba, only have two photographs (of shrubs digitally blended into spare interiors) where more are needed.

Vivien Masters has a projection where the wall looks blank most of the time. Then suddenly without warning, a sequence of 12 -15 coloured images are rapidly fired onto the screen, after which we get a blank screen once more. The process is then repeated. The staccatoed shots of blurred faces, mouths, parts of clothing or meals, seem to be about intimate relationships and the bombardment of human emotion through the senses.

Chloe King, in collaboration with Olga Toujba, has built a shelter of cardboard boxes accompanied by a voiceover describing the civil war between Georgia and Abkhazia, a conflict that has been raging since 1962. Most of us don’t know about this fight. It seems the artists are attempting to arouse international interest, perhaps even ultimately UN intervention. However using rambling, tentative, unedited voice-overs like this is pitiful, and too derivative of Nova Paul as a method. A cohesive balanced package with images, maps and careful historical explanations would be far more effective than relying on one individual’s commentary to get the gist across.

Philip Good’s panels of thinly applied oil paint, depicting suburban backyards or abandoned lots are also disappointing. The tonal weight within his images is inconsistent and unresolved spatially. Parts jump out with no logical reason why.

This is not a good exhibition. It’s too derivative and undistinctive. Perhaps the earlier two shows in this series were better. Anyway, hopefully AUT can get the space cleaned up before long, so that a superb venue matching the other two galleries opens soon.

Hands across the Tasman

Attrium Research Collective: the buzzing confusion of things
St. Paul St, Gallery 1
July 24 – August 22, 2008

The Attrium Research Collective is a group of Australian and New Zealand artists who have formed collegial links while working at AUT in Auckland and RMIT in Melbourne. A partnership has formed between the two art schools, resulting in convivial ties amongst the lecturers as they invariably got familiar with each other’s practices. This Auckland show slightly overlaps another nearly identical ARC exhibition just presented at RMIT. Four of the eight artists (Jonty Valentine, Greg Creek, Sally Mannall and Martine Corompt) have the same work in both.

The results are not really collaborations where you can dissect each work and see the contributions of different individuals. They seem to be more about dialogue between artists after they have made the work, not during. Jonty Valentine, an AUT teacher of graphic design, is the only case of a true interaction occurring between him and other artists, for he has taken their images and adapted them for presentation within an elegant hardcover book. Called A Commonplace Book, it is a collection of useful references and visual arguments, and alludes to Sally Mannall’s video, a work where she gets a group of individual students to examine an empty wooden gun case, figure out its function, and respond. Valentine has designed his book in relation to that unlatched, openable object – leaving the top folded edges of the pages intact so the owner has to cut them to open it.

Sally Mannall’s video of individuals investigating the felt-lined pistol case, makes assumptions more akin to a Kiwi sensibility than Australian. Firearms are more common (openly worn by police for example) across the Tasman, and not regarded with the great trepidation they are here, where we have more an ‘English’ than ‘American’ attitude towards them. I’ve seen people chasing each other through the streets of Melbourne, waving guns in their hands as they screamed at each other. I assumed at the time this was normal everyday behaviour for Australians.

Public fear, surveillance and the facial characteristics of criminals are all ingredients in the work of Martine Corompt. Her scroll of ersatz wallpaper depicts silhouettes of confronting, leering faces with scenes of potential petty crime. It has an inventiveness that takes a prolonged detailed examination to properly reveal, for initially it seems benign and sweet. Her other work, Cesspool, is mesmerising - an animated black puddle with transient menacing visages appearing in its rippling, flowing contours.

Greg Creek, like Corompt, likes black graphic forms, using them to explore a blending of several visual genres such as newspaper layout, comics, dribbled splatters, map contours and gestural brushmarks. His wall display is intriguing but it is his contribution to the Commonplace book that is particularly exciting, a sizzling display of riffs on speech bubbles, a set of playful extrapolations on the comic vocal convention. The highlight of the book.

Nova Paul’s The World of Interiors is a film and audio project that sit uneasily together. In fact the film is superfluous – though it does seem to refer to the title of this exhibition, a quotation form William James about the very early experiences of infants. What is striking is the intensity of the sound recording, an articulate monologue by a friend of Paul’s in Dunedin who is recovering from a breakdown. His rambling, debatable, but nevertheless pithy, comments on a huge range of subjects, such as denial (“denial is the engine room of the universe”), hospital bullying, drugs, wisdom, chakras, reflexology, and the elemental nature of psychic pain, make excellent - if not compelling - listening. It doesn’t need visual accompaniment.

David Thomas is a much admired RMIT teacher well known in both New Zealand and Australia, and a very interesting painter. His green and black site-specific contribution to the show on a tinted window and inside wall however is a disappointment, mainly because the work he had in Melbourne looked so much better – obviously the result of being extremely familiar with the spatial environs of where he works.

Part of the problem in Auckland with his painted installation results from the distracting given horizontal dotted lines on the dark window glass. However the tinted glass functions as a foil to his added shiny black rectangle inside and compels more viewer movement - and an inside/outside vertical green combination works well. In Melbourne (and I’m basing these views on online photographs) the spatial dynamic was more pronounced with its vertical planes of chroma, the rhythms of their position and orientation, and paired ‘chording’. Obviously having untinted glass windows made planar relationships clearer, and gave the work there more immediate wallop.

Ron Left is probably a better painter than Thomas (the year Sriwhana Spong won the Waikato Art Award, Left had a gloriously inventive painting in the final hang), but these days he seems far more interested in photography. The results are pretty ordinary, using processes and procedures in common usage for over thirty years now. However it is in Valentine’s book that you see Left’s talent for compositional placement being showcased. His playfulness in positioning lines of small photographs within certain sequences of pages, teasing out levels of height on different pages with repeated combinations, and contrasting colour of lines of images with tone, makes his contribution nuanced and distinctive.

The most sensual, methodical, yet haunting photographs in the show come from Monique Redmond: a series where she documents empty sections in the small, but once vibrant and busy, small town of Ohai in Southland. As population numbers dwindled and families moved north in search of work, they took their buildings with them, leaving rectangular paddocks oddly surrounded by the remaining houses, with the occasional remains of a path or garden in the middle. These subtle images show us where history has attempted to obliterate its own footsteps. You feel like an archaeologist looking at these images of absence, scrutinizing the surface ground-covering for clues. They have a discreet melancholy that forces you to imagine what was present, how it existed and why it left without a trace.

A show such as this – a collaboration between two tertiary institutions – you might expect to be dry and dully academic. While some of artists’ statements are, the work itself isn’t. There is a lot here to make a prolonged visit enjoyably memorable.

(Images from Jonty Valentine, Sally Mannall, Martine Corompt, Greg Creek, and Monique Redmond.)