Locked-down black; floating white

Jonathan Jones
Tim Melville
10 March - 10 April 2010

Jonathan Jones, an Aboriginal artist (Kamilaroi / Wiradjuri) who works in light with bulbs and neon tubes in a manner vaguely related to Bill Culbert (to set a New Zealand context), has exhibited in Auckland before. He was in Good Company Flash Lights - curated by Jim Vivieaere - which a few years ago came to Bath Street.

Jones currently presents at Tim Melville’s a suite of geometric, linear, graphite (pencil) drawings and a wall installation of glowing neon tubes arranged in a pattern of repeated diamonds.

The neon formation alludes to carved patterns on weapons and trees, painted body decorations, or configurations put on the inside of possum-skin coats. You could read these as stacked up spread-eagled (or star-jumping) figures. However if you wish to ignore such symbolic narrative, even on a formal level Jones is extremely inventive. His diamonds are rendered in single, double or triple parallel lines to create odd lopsided tensions and a curious asymmetric geometry. Just when diagonal, horizontal or vertical rhythms start to become a pulse, they abruptly tease by switching to a new sort of line that is attractively irregular.

The austere drawings of black angular and straight lines seem to reference Mondrian and van Doesberg. Apparently however they are based on desiccated riverbeds Jones has seen in India that sparkle with incrustations of dried salt. Like the neon work they subvert repetition with an odd wonky tension that dissipates at the paper edges.

Jones’s tightly executed drawings remind me of the time-based (and encoded) painted works on paper by Simon Morris, but Jones seems not interested in systems or transparent process. His images vary in their use of space: some deep, others flat and schematic; some with skimpy cursory description, others apparently fully resolved. Their peculiar inconsistency comes from their source as found lines seen from the air.

These drawings are all beautifully made but viewer preferences will inevitably be subjective, a form of free association. It’s an interesting show with the precise sharp black edges providing a vivid contrast to the blurry glare of the bright white tubes. Two opposite senses of spatial location – dark and crisp (but locked down) with light and soft (but floating) - placed side by side. A delicately understated political metaphor.

Robert Jahnke's paintings, plaques and sculpture

Robert Jahnke: Bed of Roses
Bath St
4 November - 28 November 2009

Robert Jahnke is well known for his pithy, precisely made and precisely thought-through wall sculptures that deal with post-colonial issues and Māori-Pakeha relations. They often utilize metonymy in the form of enlarged objects (such as tools like stamps or axes) representing government interests or acts of land appropriation.

Although still with a history-focussed literary sensibility, his practice has shifted in recent years away from juxtaposing visual tropes towards analysing writing structures like aphorisms. From an interest in poetry initially explored by Hotere in the late sixties, Jahnke has developed a ‘stencilled’ aphoristic text on black lacquered steel panels – often incorporating repeated intertwined background rose motifs in the manner of the American artist Christopher Wool.

Sweet-smelling roses and sharply piercing thorns are the prevalent written and illustrated motifs in this show, plus one brass bedstead that puns on a ‘bed of roses’ - as well as symbolising the aspired state of (bi)cultural conjugal bliss. With the latter he has put ‘between the sheets’ the conflict-generating Foreshore and Seabed issue about treaty and customary rights – notably the Governmental Ministerial Panel formed last March to review the 2004 F & S Act that overturned Māori claims, and from which a decision is expected at the end of this year.

The Bath St show consists of eleven lacquer on stainless steel works (most are a metre squared) that feature rose, thorn and leaf imagery usually with repeated aphoristic texts. Apart from glossy or matt black the colour symbolism extends from sienna-brown to grey-white for the letters and/or plants, and around the outside of the central oval, and as Jahnke’s clearly worded catalogue says, his non-traditional works (what is termed ‘non-customary’) ‘are Māori-centric in terms of content, and have been created by an artist who has the right to self-identification as Māori.’ This in spite of its use of the rose as an example of ‘ethnic capture of non-Maori imagery’ – something that has been going on since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

These works vary in motive from expressions of sorrow for the passing of loved ones or acts of injustice to condemnations of Pakeha ignorance. The Among Thorns Grow Roses painting series, in six parts, is a specific meditation on the Foreshore and Seabed Act, taken up again with the bedstead and aphorism installation.

Rose imagery, in the form of lead sculpture painted in black lacquer, featured in Jahnke’s last exhibition at Bath St two years ago. What seem to be new in emphasis are the aphorisms. He has two sets of six on the walls each side of the bedstead, which has a densely packed grid of pink fabric roses positioned over a large glowing lightbox.

Looking at the twelve truisms, some seem accurate (“ However long the sun shines upon a thistle it will never be a rose”), some cynical (“Roses fall, thorns remain”), others facile (“Truths and roses have thorns”), and a few derivative (“Strew not roses before swine”). The rose and thorn metaphor seems in Jahnke’s hands to be about the necessity of compromise, like in a marriage relationship. Pain and gain go together.

With his persona, Jahnke projects an earnest, contemplative, very considered sensibility. Nothing impulsive or flippant gets manifested, unlike perhaps some much younger ‘Maori’ artists, like say Wayne Youle, who whilst serious, can also surprise or shock Māori and Pakeha audiences with an exuberantly ‘Poppy’, non-academic approach.

Yet there is a subtly humorous side to Jahnke, that I for one, have never noticed before. The tacky (if not bawdy) brass bedstead is proof of that. Whilst colonial, it must also be tongue-in-cheek – as perhaps also is the dinky, very dated stencilled font and the fact that some words are merged together. This, and the use of colour, seems to be new. Nice move.

Bath St. dip

Group show: New works
Bath St
23 September - 31 October 2009

Sixteen new artworks from eight artists associated with this gallery, provide the body of this Bath street exhibition. The show seems a little under-nourished, but these ten items (from five of the contributors) made the visit worthwhile for me.

Some of the works make corny puns about the gallery name, but succeed nevertheless. Peter Gibson-Smith’s pencil drawing covered with what seems to be wax shows a three colonial gentlemen bathing in the geothermal waters of the Pink and White Terraces. It looks like a digital work with its regular hatching, but the transparent coating seems to be a conceptual metaphor referencing the 1886 Tarawera eruption that is depicted in the background and of which the subjects are blissfully unaware.

Tom Sladden has a swimming pool included with a podium and harbour mouth in three deliberately ‘unfinished’ paintings, rendered on wooden panels. They exert a fascination through the fact that pieces of drawn or painted-upon paper can be added to their surfaces, as evident from the detectable remnants of double-sided tape. The viewer is forced to mentally envisage alternative possibilities for these ‘empty’ images.

This interest in process continues in four works by Tanja Nola that examine the chemical constituents that underpin not only traditional photography but also metal and glass casting, and grinding and polishing. One is an image that takes five years to be completed, the three others being sculptures with casting crystal as the central component. Despite examining various craft methodologies these seem surprisingly surreal (even Dali-esque) - though Nola has a history of such a sensibility in her photography – and an intriguing cross-disciplinary hybrid.

Louise Purvis exhibits wall sculptures that are fibreglass models of topographic maps, covered with flock. She takes an essentially horizontal method of spatial representation and turns it into a vertical wall relief, and then wittily covers it with a wallpaper material in an unexpected act of self-mockery - as if she half wants to hide it. There is an peculiar unresolved conflict going on, for the flock could also be coloured grass.

The highlight is an amusing Denys Watkins portrait of Pluto the Disney dog painting a picture. He is holding it with one ear, while having a brush tied to his tail. The image is ambiguous, for the camouflage-coloured hound is also standing on a table. He appears to be looking out a window/painting, as if trying to escape. Watkins could be commenting on the sometimes claustrophobic nature of art, or he might be saying the opposite, that it is our salvation, that as a form of fantasy it rescues artists from the tedium of everyday living.

Twenty-three in the Bath

Group Show: December exhibition
Bath St
2 December - 20 December 2008

Christmas stock shows, whilst they can be irritatingly trivial if the works seem like dinky trinkets, are also a good way to surveying a gallery proprietor’s taste. They give you a chance to see if there is a pattern or consistency. What makes them tick? What aesthetically or conceptually pushes their buttons? They might even avoid consistency.

This Bath St show is spread out on the walls of the large L-shaped room so the twenty-three artists don’t get in each other’s way. Even small sculpture is on the walls.

A cursory glance indicates that there are some formal and stylistic groupings that link some of the artists and works together. Circular wheel forms – for example - are found in Louise Purvis and Robert Jahnke works. In painting also, overlapping and undulating net forms are seen in Katie Thomas and Kathryn Stevens. Or pressuring shape with contour-edge or line in Leon van den Eijkel and James Ross.

If I could scurry into the gallery in the dead of night with a suitcase and help myself, the works I’d pinch would be the gorgeous Denys Watkins’ Indian works on paper and Katie Thomas’ two fascinating ‘net’ paintings. And I’d probably risk a hernia by also grabbing Bob Jahnke’s wonderful 'crayfish pot' made of corten steel.

I’d be tempted by the several mesmerising drawing/photographic hybrids in this show: works of ink on photographs by James Robinson (for him subdued and restrained); a photochemical drawing by Grant Beran; and surrealist photographs by Tanja Nola.

There is plenty to think about here. Peter Gibson Smith’s shaped panels use intersecting planes in a manner related to the drawings of Georgie Hill (at Ivan Anthony), but with a delicate scrubbed coloration that avoids intensity, using modelled forms, not negative shapes.

There are also Anna Eggert’s intriguing sets of common objects covered by wound-on data cable. The effect of repeated tiny horizontal lines creates shifting moirelike patterns, unpredictable rhythms and curious optical blendings.

Eggert is an Australian artist, as is Jonathan Jones, previously shown here in the Jim Vivieaere curated exhibition Good Company Flash Lights. He now presents shelves holding wiping sponges. On these he has placed aboriginal motifs that look like bark painting patterns, and which also seem connected to Jasper Johns’ famous ‘flagstone’ paintings. The sponge serves perhaps as a clever post-colonial metaphor, the wiping away of one culture maybe to superimpose another.

This is a good exhibition to leisurely ponder over. It has an enjoyable diversity.

Descending from top to bottom, images are of works by Katie Thomas, Robert Jahnke, James Robinson, Tanja Nola, Peter Gibson Smith, Anna Eggert and Jonathan Jones.

Grotesquerie fused with caricature

Robert McLeod: Great Moments in the History of Painting
Bath St
5 November - 29 November 2008

Robert McLeod is well known for his skills as a skilled colourist and inventor of bizarre hybrid forms. In this spectacular mural/installation, he has carefully constructed a sequence of cut-out and painted plywood forms, and pencil-over-oil-on-cardboard drawings, leaning them on or screwing them into the four walls in a linear progression like musical notation. The resulting long configuration is like a parade of clusters of human bodies, and punctuating single units. Within it is a variety of intriguing image types, ranging from Elizabeth Murray style, cartoon-based, flat abstraction, to satirical caricature in the style of Bryan Dew. These juxtaposed or overlapping negative and silhouetted forms constantly provide surprises for attentive viewers as they trek the edges of Bath Street’s large L-shaped space.

Most of the satire mixes Mickey-Mouse heads with leering and groping old men, hairless but coy naked babes and urinating dogs, all linked to splattered plywood shadows on the floor and spasmodic references to McLeod’s own painting process.

Portions of these different body types are recombined to create new morphological surprises like in a Picasso drawing, and it is this playful aspect (improvisation for its own sake, and not to defame) that takes much of McLeod’s imagery away from satire into the realm of the grotesque. The hybrid body forms are deliberately ugly. They reject elegance, being histrionic, heavy-handed in their condemnatory tone and repulsively deformed. The show is a celebration of the misshapen. Yet within these angular, elongated and lumpy inter-tangled body parts, McLeod shows his skills as a colourist. His palette can be delicate and nuanced, even when mischievously placed alongside stickily dripping hues that are abrasive and strident.

The relationship between the grotesque and caricature is a fascinating one. Robert Storr discusses it at great length in his catalogue for the 2004 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, as does Mike Kelley in the ‘Foul Perfection’ essay that he wrote for artforum in 1989. Kelley sets up an argument placing the tradition of ornamental painted motifs discovered in the late fifteenth century in the subterraean ruins of Neronian Rome, in opposition to Adolf Loos' famous anti-ornament, modernist diatribe where decoration is perceived as immoral. Though ‘grotesque’ is often synonymous with ‘ugly’, and applied to works like that of Quintin Massys the earlier mentioned sense of a playful shuffling of facial or bodily components is more useful, particularly when the purpose is to surprise the viewer rather than to malign any subject.

It is interesting to see McLeod do both, for on occasions he does occupy a moral high ground attacking lust, vanity and human stupidity in general - and he is corny in his attacks on lecherous (rich?) old men preying on defenceless bimbos. Yet this work is very different from any fingerwagging lecture, and initially not easy to like visually. Like the works of say, Peter Saul or Ashley Bickerton, these images are not décor, but will dominate any room and any visitor’s mind with their lack of repetition, subtly placed colour and inventively shaped construction.

Dissolving stainless steel

Gregor Kregar: Immersive Echoes
Bath St
8 October -1 November 2008

Gregor Kregar is widely known for his ceramic male figures and sheep, and later Mario Merz-derived globes. The former I have always found too clunky and cute, and the latter, a bit obvious. This new work of crystalline, pyramidal, steel clusters however, seems much more interesting.

Though they hint of the sixties and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic projects, it is the ‘invisibility’ of Gregor’s shiny, stainless steel facets that intrigue - how they absorb the surrounding environment with multiple, undulating, triangular planes. Their reflections distort differently from the way that say, harsh mirror glass would, being of a softer sheen, and there is a gentle wobble to each plane that cumulatively creates a gentle rippling effect overall.

In the Bath St Gallery the tall free standing sculpture is the most successful because it capitalises on the inside of the corrugated iron roof above it. Yet these works need to be placed and seen outdoors, particularly near lots of trees or panoramic vistas with open skies. It is not their structure that fascinates but their interactive surfaces.

The Liquid Geometry series of digital photographs make nice 2D foils to the sculpture, with fragments of sky superimposed into planar details of drawn sculpture. The ones of skyscrapers, with cloudy skies placed into their letterlike, planar rooves, seem sterile at first, yet they grow on you with their allusions to tangrams and geometric puzzles.

One of the big polished sculptures deserves to end up in an Auckland public park. The gallery space in Parnell seems inappropriate for their particular assets which are wasted. Despite the corrugated roof, it is too bland a venue.

Spiritual art

Riduan Tomkins: Towards Dancing with Dragons
Kazu Nakagawa: Knowing
Bath St Gallery
10 September – 4 October 2008

These two shows are clearly separated even though they are in the same space. There are no paintings on the walls near Nakagawa’s elegant sculpture, for Tomkins’ works are placed near the entrance and loading bay. This works well for the exhibitions. Though dissimilar, both have a metaphysical air.

Nakagawa’s work is entirely handmade from wood and the occasional piece of string, all the tripods being made of lathed dowelling, all the suspended balls ground with a machine. There are no smooth surfaces, only patterns of striations, which makes them highly seductive. The ring of balls, irregular in its height, avoiding perfect symmetry, is visually appealing but perhaps ultimately dull. It is too pleasing and too formal, without any bite.

Tomkins is well known as an influential teacher of painting at Ilam in Christchurch from the mid eighties to early nineties. He has spent a lot of time in Indonesia and these works differ from his canvases of fifteen years ago in that the cultural references in his images are now more obvious. We see lots of dragons and tiny little men in long flowing robes standing between tall city walls.

The painting is indebted to Richard Diebenkorn’s landscapes but much more graphic, flatter and humorous – even though it seems preoccupied with death. There is lots of sensitively applied underpainting and carefully considered, taut lines. However Tomkins at his very best, is super tight, and these aren’t. They don’t have the air of inevitability that he is capable of achieving with exact positioning. They are comparatively distracted.

And Time stood still

On Show: 2008
Bath St Gallery
12 June - 5 July 2008

As photography shows go, this is a very odd exhibition organised by the journal Photoforum, because although there is some wonderful work included – especially by Darren Glass and Joyce Campbell – it gives a staid and limited notion of what photographic practice can be.

A lot of the work here could have come straight out of The Active Eye, a New Zealand photography survey exhibition that toured this country in 1975. A huge amount of change within the medium has occurred since then, but apart from the colour you wouldn’t think so from this show. There is no digitally modified photography (eg. Jae Hoon Lee, Gavin Hipkins, Megan Jenkinson), no extravagant props (eg Boyd Webb, Christine Webster), no conceptual adventurousness (eg.Layla Rudneva–Mackay).

Instead it usually dwells on landscape and the prosaic urban, subject-matter now that is pretty tiresome. Basically documentary in focus, it fixates on the passing of time and loss of buildings, individuals and communities. Nothing wrong with that in small doses, but it is restricted.

Yet once you understand that New Zealand photography is a hell of a lot wider in scope than this small cross-section, then checking out these 14 artists is fun. Glass and Campbell, as I’ve indicated, make extraordinary photographs and their work here is better than what is included in Close-Up at the Gus Fisher (tastier images for Glass, more intimate scale for Campbell). David Cook’s night-time colour shots have a subtle hallucinatory quality caused by the chromatic wavelength of the lighting, and Robyn Hoonhout’s glowing lightboxes depicting unclothed elderly women are beautiful and courageous (from the models’ viewpoint).

There are other wonderful images. Bruce Connew’s prismatic photographs are intriguing with their vaguely pointillist hazy colour, and Gary Blackman’s droll ‘Tiger Chair at Piano Farm,Taieri’ conjures up pictures of circuses and sleeping domestic felines.

There is some excellent work here, but overall not as exciting as it should and could be.

Images (ascending from bottom) from Darren Glass, Gary Blackman, David Cook, Bruce Connew,Robyn Hoonhout, Joyce Campbell