Elizabeth Thomson: lost in space

Elizabeth Thomson: La Planète Sauvage
Two Rooms
24 November 2009 - 22 December 2009

This Liz Thomson show is a step backwards from the sparkling fluoro, overly complicated, glass ‘mini-mattress’ relief sculptures she showed upstairs at Two Rooms last year. She has reverted to the plant forms she is famous for by attaching the small, painted zinc, pohutukawa leaves to shallow-relief ‘planet’ discs and wall surfaces to make up a sort of dotty linear drawing. It looks as if she has made too many tiny leaves and rather than throw them away wasted, decided to keep on using them, even in ‘outer space’ where in that context they look ludicrous.

Apart from the irritating leaves, the drawings of ellipses in perspectively receding alignments (Astrophysics Series) look intriguing – foreshortened saucers on the flat surfaces of relief discs is a clever idea with great visual wit. And the large white projecting shallow disc (Voyage Sauvage) on the other side of the room, peppered with glass ‘mothballs’ on sticks, is absorbing too, with the small balls serving as microcosms to the ‘mother’-macro.

Thomson’s ‘Planète Sauvage’ series are strikingly dramatic lunar images, but spoilt by being shallow relief. Flat discs flush with the wall, devoid of mass, would have been less clunky and, if less over-elaborate in surface textures, much superior. And the huge perspective ‘leaf’ drawing of receding ‘Versailles’ runways on the large wall looks like a strange form of oddly delicate folk art. It is too awkward to succeed because the different–sized leaves and horizontal ovals don’t quite co-ordinate to match the angle of the tilted lanes.

There is nothing here that is a total success – usually because the smooth rounded contours of the three-dimensional circles are such a distraction – but Voyage Sauvage comes close with its comparative understatement and reflexivity. It alone is worth a second visit.

The Shimmering Lakes ‘wall drawing’ image above is at Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington.

Charred lines

Elizabeth Thomson: Supposition
Two Rooms
18 September - 18 October 2008

I’ve always considered Elizabeth Thomson’s earlier graphic images far superior to her bronze wall sculptures of plants and giant insects - which to me are about technique only, and conceptually vacant. The recent pokerwork tondos again show off her technical aptitude, and probably would work better as big etchings or even charcoal drawings, but the images (burnt on to casein covered plywood) do indisputably resonate. They are visually intriguing.

They deal with the microcosmic world of nature, specially its cellular structure. Seemingly from plants, the drawn shapes are ambiguous. They could also be chipped off mineral flakes, reptilian scales, crystals or bubbles. The branded sepia line is subtly smudged into the grain of the ply.

Thomson’s line–making method irritates me. Is there a rationale, some semantic layering maybe to do with content, or is it merely a gimmick? Perhaps if the scorched images were entirely of wooden objects and Thomson was commenting on transience, or if the artist were attempting a conceptual statement (like the Australian artist Narelle Jubelin) about the politics of craft, there might be a detectable logic, but Thomson’s method seems akin to building a chair out of matchsticks. There are easier ways of creating the same appearance, and without a unique means to an end she seems to be fetishising her labour. It’s a rather pointless, dumb exercise.

Collective minds

The Swarm: a peek into the hive-mind of group dynamics
Curated by Andrew Clifford
Gus Fisher
11 July -16 August 2008

Here is a juicy question:

When you assess a show, how much of it is from analysing the overarching curatorial premise (if that is stated), and the relationship of the ingredients to that – and how much is dependent on the quality of the individual items, regardless of curatorial intent?

After all, a viewer can ignore the intention of a curator if they wish, or the artist, or both – and the curator can ignore the artist (and maybe viewer) too. The axiom ‘Trust the art, not the artist’ is pretty sound commonsense if you believe art should have its own internal logic and independent semiotic life, most of it accessible visually. Perhaps the creator is the last person to ask about an artwork. There are likely to be unconscious components clear to outsiders that the artist is blissfully unaware of, and things that the artist thinks are glaringly obvious, which somehow, have mysteriously evaporated.

Okay, back to curatorial premises, as with this show. Some of the work supports Andrew Clifford’s interest in ‘a group infrastructure that wields more power than the some of the parts’ and some of it doesn’t. He references films like The Birds and The Swarm where wild creatures decide to organise themselves against humans.

When he succeeds in presenting a case for his premise, Clifford’s choices are brilliant. The music is very clever as a source of persuasion. From Scratch’s recording of Gung Ho, and Clifford’s discussion of Phil Dadson’s interest in hocketting (overlapping melodic phrases or rhythms from different sources) is fascinating - as is Douglas Bagnall’s Music Industry Simulator, which breaks down into formulae the melody structures of pop tunes to make them reconstitutable into ‘originals’ like building blocks. Also very witty in this context is Ani O’Neill’s collection of communally made, woollen knitted circles that could also be colourful bacterial colonies.

Not so ambiguous, but perfectly apt nonetheless, are Gregory Bennett’s sci-fi videos and images of thousands of little naked men, scampering in an unleashed tide through buildings. Louise Fong’s 1995 painting Cluster, with its satellite paintings encircling a central ‘mother’ canvas, is also an extremely clever element picked by Clifford.

With the other works, I felt they were dominated by too many different ‘atomic particles’ rather than ‘linkable’ elements that had a commonality. The art that depicted insects, that of Richard Killeen and Elizabeth Thomson, seemed to present too varied a range of species to suggest the existence of a communal mind. And Matt Molloy’s rickety bookcase of Christine Hellyarlike plaster and latex casts of egg-covered surfaces again seemed too unfocussed in content to fit the theme.

Now, as I suggested earlier, you could say ‘bollocks’ to the curator and just enjoy the show for its separate individual items, forgetting the theme. We all know that even one work, if it really excites us, is worth a visit to an otherwise tedious exhibition.

Rest assured there is nothing tedious here. There’s plenty to enjoy. Plenty of engaging parts for only a partially resolved whole. That doesn’t really matter, for it’s really an excuse to put some stimulating art out for an audience that might enjoy it. And they will. Nothing wrong with that.

(Above images from Richard Killeen, Ani O'Neill and Gregory Bennett.)