Mystic panoramic sandwiches

Barbara Tuck: Habits of Paradise
Anna Miles
7 April – 8 May 2010

The six recent Barbara Tuck oil paintings displayed here were made during a trip to the South Island’s McKenzie Country, that sparsely populated, high altitude basin that straddles the border between Canterbury and Otago.

These paintings are quite impressionistic – in the sense of mental impressions, not qualities of light on surfaces. They contain collage-like fragments of landscape or clumps of terrain, botany or sky, usually aligned within horizontal strata. Earlier shows of hers have been more vertical or diagonal with their organisation of vista portions – as if looking up through or down into treetop canopies. These compositions have a sense of looking across austere grass-covered landforms towards dominant mountain ranges. There is a sense of loosely stacking multiple views on top of each other that is vaguely related to a famous Cental Otago Rita Angus painting, where the sky at the top is replaced with a new imposed landscape foreground – like a club sandwich. Or like McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury which is like a sequence of film story-boards made by a cycling traveller.

Tuck’s organic images however have a wild spontaneity that is totally different from Angus or McCahon. She seems to enjoy riffing with certain repeated brush lines that often reference landforms, foliage or patterns on chinaware. Her oil paint is thin and runny, providing an oozy, bubbly sensuality that lets the underpainted gessoed board shine through.

Tuck obviously delights in mark making, and there is a strong sense of obsessive process where the aim is not a refined, compositionally perfect product but an outpouring of restless energy and felt response to the environs. This is strangely related to Alan Pearson’s squiggly improvisations painted while listening to Italian opera, Bill Hammond‘s early suburban interiors made while grooving to rock music, or Phil Clairmont’s excitement with Hendrix: an intoxicatingly bodily drive that results in experiments with shape and line. Except Tuck’s ‘music’ is the McKenzie Basin location itself and the wonder of its particular geology, climate, flora and fauna.

Sometimes she has pale blobby forms floating in front of the picture plane, flat curved shapes hovering in a space all their own and painted with thin blue twitchy lines. These slightly foetal decorative forms disrupt the image like a floating Brent Wong architrave and their oddness undermines even the discordant collaged feel of painted fragmentation – as if symbolic in intention and slightly at odds with the surrounding space. However such shapes, like the rest of her spontaneously arranged textures, patterns and rendered vistas, are kick-started by an intuitive response to an unusual location. Their unpredictable properties, dwelling on interiority and spiritual preoccupations (as indicated by her titles) reinforce the subjectivity of her method.

The paintings, in descending order, are: O Maramu. Ahuriri Augellus; Unfurnished Eye; About Fleeing; Pour and melt of Distances; Soul’s Neural Tekapo.

Hot vertiginous pleasures

Amber Wilson: The Bends
Anna Miles
3 March - 1 April 2010

A couple of months ago I visited a group show out at Unitec’s Snowwhite gallery and commented on the watercolours of Amber Wilson. The year is passing quickly and her new oil paintings – now showing at Anna Miles – are understandably quite different, though still very much preoccupied with pattern and rhythm.

Whereas the watercolours were restrained, Wilson’s eight oil paintings are, in contrast, as you might expect, ‘full on’. They revel in loud garish organic patterns, yet when you study them, there is a lot of nuance. First impressions can be deceptive, and the colour is not as saturated as you might suppose - though it certainly is heated. In fact it is not shrill, but highly insistent and at times muted. More importantly, Wilson’s use of shape is extremely inventive.

These richly patterned canvases look like they are a hybrid of Ed Paschke and Elizabeth Murray, or made by Howard Hodgkin on acid. Their backgrounds seem to also allude to Victorian book marbling, fabric design, underwater sponges and lush beds of rampant tropical flowers. The inner shapes floating in front, containing plain or swirling colours in silhouette, hint of items as varied as animal parts, Moorish architecture or rubber stamps. There seems to be no embracing logic, but appear to have evolved through intuition.

If anything they are linked by humour that plays across the figure - ground relationship. There pervades a nutty ambiguity so that shape is always generating multiple interpretations. It is always loaded and rarely ‘pure’ abstraction. The vertiginous psychedelic wackiness is tempered by meticulous control of tone and a subtly serrated edge, especially when rendered by tiny multiple brushstrokes.

Wilson’s inventively decorative paintings are rich heady concoctions that celebrate ocular pleasure. They might overwhelm, but with their very considered placement and knowing pattern alignment, they are not out of control.

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.

Glass selection

Darren Glass: Confusus turbatus
Anna Miles
6 March - 4 April 2008

Darren Glass is much admired for his unique custom-made cameras that use long exposure times, the extraordinary individualistic images they produce, and the breath-taking range of projects he has successfully researched. He often exhibits these cameras as ‘sculptures’ without photographs, a term that accentuates their unusual form (compact or linear) but which sidelines their special function as mark-making tools. The photographs contextualise them as carefully constructed three-dimensional objects while conversely, any comprehension of the paper images comes from mentally grasping each camera design and locations of their various apertures. His processes are akin to those of Stephen Pippin but are more portable, less urban in subject matter, and less industrial in the containers that he uses. The sculptures formally have a touch of Richard Deacon.

This small show presents a sample ten kinds of image from ten such varieties of ‘sculpture’. Some of these cameras and their images are more conventional than others. Glass has made over ninety types and is about to publish a book describing their making - demonstrating what they can do. There is a lot of curiosity about the details underpinning the inventiveness of his methods.

In this mini-survey some of the images feature very subtle distortions of landscape forms; others are stretched out in long horizontal rectangles with unexpected objects appearing within each panorama. Others have repeated exposures forming specked flares of diffuse granular light or swirling lines made by the camera sent spinning through the air like a Frisbee or rolling down a hill. Some of these lines are tightly patterned within circular ring or grid formations; others are wildly chaotic and frenetically skate across the whole image.

The ‘Flying Discs’ are particularly interesting: one such camera with seven apertures has its mark-making characteristics displayed with four photos. Seven circles within a circle, each with glowing ribbons splayed out and twisting from an unravelling – but increasingly convulsive - coil.

I admire these works like I like Paul Hartigan’s spiralling ‘Revolution’ neon wall-sculptures – they have a fascinating tension. The spatial ambiguities of the coils have a tightly flexed compression about to spring free, and straighten out. There is a suggested freedom that reflects a refusal to mimic the world cameras usually examine, but create a new one using the laws of chemistry, gravity and motion. Rarely is linear light so adventurous.

Nine miles apart

Group Show: Christmas Party
Anna Miles
27 November - 20 December 2008

This show of nine Anna Miles artists has a dense (but not distracting) salon hang of mostly small works. There are also other items in the drawer cabinet and table, and on the lightboxes between the windows.

As the title suggests the exhibition has a celebratory air – but no thematic focus. Few Xmas shows do.

Personally for me, the biggest surprises are the large Kim Meeks’ works that are earlier than his recent show. They have obvious affinities with Andrew McLeod and Gavin Hipkins with their use of sourcing book illustration and fine digital detailing, and much more concise than his colour work.

Janet Green’s urns impress with their simple shapely elegance and delicate, almost translucent colouration, while Richard Stratton’s ceramics, through ornate, don’t cloy but amuse through an insistently light but bold graphic touch.

The circular images by innovative photographer Darren Glass show his use of motion to create blurry spirals. They coincidentally seem related to Paul Hartigan’s recent neon sculpture, but are mysterious as traces.

Sriwhana Spong’s flat lacquer ornaments, with bits of embedded mirror and chain, are refreshingly organic and unpristine. Their squashed, casual lumpiness gives them an aesthetic of manual vulgarity that stands out in Miles’ gallery, an unexpected but scintillating crudeness.

Works illustrated – descending from top to bottom - are by Octavia Cook, Kim Meeks, Janet Green, Richard Stratton (urn and plate), and Darren Glass.

Spooky trees

Johanna Pegler: Earthling
Anna Miles
29 October - 22 November 2008

Pegler’s work is interesting not because of any technical finesse but because of the sense certain paintings have of mysterious unseen powers. ‘Uncanny’ is one way of describing this, ‘pantheistic’ is another. The good works are not straight landscapes – that would be dead boring. They have an eerie foreboding, a hard-to–pin-down creepiness. It is a characteristic that makes her work interesting because this quality that makes her paintings similar to say Margot Philips, the Waikato painter, may not be deliberately planned. It seems to just happen.

In this show, two of the three works have this undercurrent. One of an estuary bed, has Daliesque pools in the foreground arranged like a multi-eyed anamorphic face. It doesn’t look natural, as if there is a code to be cracked by examining the formal placement of rebuslike elements. The other terrific work is of what, at first glance, seems to be wind moving the branches of trees. The rhythms hint that the trees themselves are moving their branches, not any breeze.

I’ve commented on this unsettling quality before in Pegler’s paintings. It really like it when it appears. It is a form of surrealism that links her Wanganui landscapes with Lynch and Hitchcock. Without it though, her paintings are forgettable.

More Spong

Swriwhana Spong: Solar Midnight
Anna Miles
1 October - 25 October 2008

Hot on the heels of her recent Newcall gallery show we have this new presentation from Sriwhana Spong. This one has some of the same hanging beaded thread sculpture and blobby lacquered fetish panels as Newcall, but there are also other new mobiles, collages and digital photographs referencing the great Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Overall, though wider in thematic content, this display suffers from the limitations of Anna Miles’ awkwardly cramped and distracting, glary windowed space. A lot of the work does not succeed visually, especially the collages on cardboard and free-hanging mobiles which seem compositionally indecisive and don’t draw you in. The new video in particular is indulgently solipsistic in its referencing of Javanese artefacts in some American museums - blurrily filmed with a furtive pinhole camera as some kind of pathetic protest at having cameras officially banned.

Of all the items presented, the lacquer focussed projects work best – like in the Newcall show. Old 78 rpm records have been melted down to make black paint that’s been applied thickly to wooden struts or panels, or thinly to filmy muslin shawls. Spong’s puddle-shaped blobby forms hold assorted items like poppy seeds, hairclips, mirror fragments, butts, chains, pins and thread within their hardened viscous ooze, and allude to the eclipse of the show’s title and Nijinsky himself. Being from records, the paint has an implied aural and historical component conceptually built in.

Particularly striking is Spong’s new use of blue filters, which brings an air of melancholy to her photographs and collages, linking them in mood to Joseph Cornell or Lindy Lee, and of course, Nijinsky’s own depression and mental collapse.

The links Spong makes connecting the Russian dancer’s hand movements, in the photos of her collages, with Javanese performers help a little to explain her interest in him, though one wonders how far the thematic links extend with the painted lacquer. Is the music linked to Diaghilev’s productions that Nijinsky danced to in the melted grooves of the black puddles? How tight is the significance of the history of the particular items (not substances) in grasping the nuances of Spong’s collected assortments. How focussed are the details? Perhaps I am being too literal in such a narrative based interpretation?

Dj of the ornamental

Kim Meek: Hoopla
Anna Miles
16 July - 2 August 2008

Kim Meek is one of those artists who rakes over the web searching for interesting images to find, dismember and digitally re-fuse with other elements. His use of sampling however, when applied to a passion for the ornamental, makes him similar to a dj using turntables as an instrument, mixing beats and blending tunes. He likes pattern and rhythm, and putting normally incongruous surfaces together in layers so they look natural. His sources are wildly unpredictable, from images of bizarre forms of animal life to illustrations of tropical fruit, from circus posters to Islamic architectural tracery, from Mughal sword blade motifs to Japanese prints, American comics and English textiles.

The resulting hybrids are a bit like Richard Killeen’s digital images but are not self referential as his can be. These also have no interest in spatial illusion, being flat and collagelike. Nor are they always precise, for sometimes they have a folk-artish rawness, a rough painterliness - depending on where the image has come from.

To continue with the music analogy, because aural sensation has more impact on the body than visual, optical work like this rarely has the immediate visceral power that music often has. And they do seem like complicated, icy, cerebral exercises to some degree, not sweeping you away. Yet the delicate complexity of Meek’s work draws you in, making you stand close to appreciate them. Most of their detail cannot be captured in photographs because background and foreground are carefully woven together (and often tonally matched) to make the whole picture-plane a busy, seething surface.

It’s not all abstract sensation though. Allusions via pendulous fruit and nut forms to testicles and breasts, and sliced squid to vulvas, introduce a slightly creepy humour. They have a devious surreal undercurrent that enriches them. Meek has picked forms loaded with associations. They may not be immediately visceral but they do have a dreamlike ability to startle music rarely can provide.

Advancing photography backwards

Darren Glass: Lapilli
Anna Miles Gallery
11 June - 8 July 2008

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in old camera technologies, not as a backlash against digital methodology but more an interest in new sorts of image construction. (Exploring photography as a type of drawing perhaps?) Darren Glass has made over 75 pinhole cameras (including an airborne Frisbee variety) in an effort to discover startling forms of photographic marks. His cameras also double as sculptures. There is a nostalgic component to these landscapes - they look related to say Burton Brothers images - but the mindset is nevertheless contemporary in its blending of abstraction with figuration, and its interest in process.

The photographs here were made during a six week residency in December 2006, in the heart of the North Island at Tongariro National Park. Three cameras sit on the central table in Anna Miles’ gallery and three sorts of image are on the walls, each with their own optical peculiarities.

With his Multiple Aperture Pinhole Camera for 10” x 100” film, Glass concentrated on waterfalls in the Park - plus the occasional Ohakune Carrot. Washers behind the pinholes kept the exposures in a circular format. Using a Multiple Aperture Panoramic Pinhole Camera for 70 mm film he also recorded valleys and scree slopes overlooked from the Tongariro Crossing, incorporating eastern and western views in the same image by alternating the camera’s orientation correct way up or inverted. From these two projects he made strips of contact prints.

In his third project, using a rock for a tripod and a Telephoto Slit Camera from a cardboard tube, Glass created a set of quite different separated images, of Mt. Ngauruhoe at sunrise and sunset. These images are surprisingly different at the beginning and ending of daylight. They strangely distort so that at evening the mountain looks quite flat and bathed in washes of blue, while in early morning it is much much steeper and a dark silhouette.

This is a remarkable exhibition due to the artist’s passion for inventive research and experiment. His love of camera design and subsequent image creation make it a highlight of the Auckland Festival of Photography.

Imaginary worlds

Barbara Tuck: Calibrating the loss of Sparrow Hawk
Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
26 March - 19 April 2008

Barbara Tuck’s paintings usually feature sections of dripping overhanging vegetation hovering in an isolated, highly ambiguous space, with a soft diffuse light behind them. In the past there was a sense of piecemeal fragmentation where the placement of each luxuriant botanical extravaganza seemed tentative, but in this exhibition her composition is particularly confident. There is the same deliberately imprecise rendering of foliage and ground and playing off of light and dark as before, but now also there is a new interest in a deeper perspectival space: receding horizon lines are mixed with a hint of the panoramic.

The positioning of elements is now so assured, and the panels are bigger. Amongst the leafy clusters are ochre landforms with sky-reflecting rock pools. We are seeing more earth.

Tuck has a distinctive manner of stroking the thin paint onto the board she uses as a support. This makes the earth around the copses of trees feathery and softly mottled. The very air seems caressed. With these paintings imaginary ingredients flow into one another; sprouting vines and barky growths blend into wispy clouds of Naples yellow and lavender mist.

Tuck’s use of fictitious landforms is similar to the landscapes created by the great Waikato surrealist, Margot Philips (in the Chartwell Collection but not illustrated online) except that with Philips the light is much harsher, there are few trees, and furrows of the land are like those of a giant exposed brain. Both utilise fantasies from within to make haunting extrapolations of their natural environment.

Seven by Five

Woke Up This Morning: Sarah Hillary, Johanna Pegler, Kate Small, Isobel Thom and Barbara Tuck.
Anna Miles, Auckland
1 – 23 February, 2008

Five painters present their work in Anna Miles’ intimate little suite in High St. Some might make something of the fact all the artists are women. I’m not so sure. There is a lot of variation here. Still the show's title comes from The Sopranos theme song "Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun" - apparently about a woman who killed her husband after twenty years of violent abuse - so there is a political edge intended by Miles to be a mental frame. You wouldn't think so though, from the paintings alone. In this millenium more than ever, it is foolhardy to make assumptions about the gender of an artist just by examining their work.

Kate Small at first glance seems to be a slightly more realist version of Riduan Tomkins – an artist well known in Christchurch where he taught painting at Ilam - but her works are without the modernist figurescape. Her similarly understated paintings instead allude to deep space through perspective, though seen through a haze achieved by an even manipulation of tones.


Her square painting depicts a scene at the Parnell baths, with two slightly elongated figures, women in swimsuits in a waterless pool. There is a suggestion of psychological interaction between the two women, and a palpable tension between them and the enclosed space, with its ceiling, walls, furniture and floor. The pastel tones suggest heat more than water.

Johanna Pegler’s painting has a psychological dimension too, but about nature as a spiritual force, and not humans. Instead of two people Pegler has two trees, a pine and a lemon, placed on a bank with the former towering over the latter. The drama in the work comes from the cracklike lines formed by the dark pine branches set against the pale sky. There is a found expressive quality in these jagged lines alluding to an emotional intensity that seems to come from nature as an everwatching moral power. This is pantheism of which Wordsworth would be proud.


Barbara Tuck’s painting connects with this, but in a more Blakean or Huxleyan manner, using the structure of the molecular (like Hanly) but with imagery from nature that is not microcosmic. Her work uses mapping shapes to enclose vistas from landscape or plant details, utilising a human scale and references to culture like cartography or particle physics. Tuck’s oil application is particularly sensual and painterly with this recent work being slightly larger than previously. The lush and delicately coloured shapes butt against each other like little islands of rendered rock or vegetation, huddling together in a sea of melting blossomy snow.


Sprigs of blossom also figure strongly in Sarah Hillary paintings, providing an implied grid on which to place seashells, fish, vases and the occasional scrawny bird. With her work the chunky white ornate frames dominate, bringing a needed physical presence to boost her small panels. Her rhythmic images are curious in the way they treat (or don’t treat) pattern, for the two panels divide the field up so regular repetition doesn’t take hold. The result is like a tantalising tune that doesn’t quite have a melody but is half suggested. Her placement of two panels side by side similarly creates peculiar tensions where the suggested patterns avoid a strident dynamic and remain anaemic, circumnavigating the muscular.


In Isobel Thom’s paired paintings her imperious gaze (at herself in the mirror) provides the structure for her grey and black marks. Her self portraits have a touch of Gabo’s constructivism without being hollow shells. They look almost like they are made from pieces of torn paper with their glowing, finely delineated edges. The work is admirably clinical and seems to be the result of some industrial process, especially in the modelling around the neck and head, where there is a complex but planned colliding of multi-sided and interconnecting planes. From her very limited palette, Thom manages to achieve an especially rich and absorbing image – mixing early twentieth century modernism with a very contemporary sense of the cybernetic.



While not a tight show, the connections between Pegler and Small, Tuck and Hillary, and Thom and Small (with their sense of alienation) prevent it from being too fragmented. There is plenty to think about. A cleverly nuanced exhibition.