Geological museum window

Finn Ferrier: Basalt and Asphalt
Window
9 October - 5 November 2009

Though Finn Ferrier in his art works tends to present himself as an earnestly zealous rock hound/archaeologist there is a lovely gentle humour throughout this installation in Window, adjacent to the Auckland University Library foyer entrance. While he as avid collector seems to like to obsess over the origin, movement and use of quarried mineral types around the Auckland region, assiduously labelling for his own museum in tiny white print the original location and time of finding for each geological sample, he also loves to mix into his table top display unexpectedly ludicrous ingredients.

These include a ‘rock candy’ sugar stick, a packet of yellow ‘river rocks’ – coloured gravel for aquaria, a ‘rock key holder’ still unopened, thermal mud soap, and packets of ‘collectable’ rocks for junior learners. Plus pieces of broken orange indicator-light glass, metal bottle tops, bits of wooden post, bits of coloured soft chalk, chunks of pebble encrusted tar, slices of concrete pipe – even a stone with a broken match on top of it, both securely wrapped in Gladwrap. There is also a sign, written in grey stones, expressing some homespun, optimistic folk philosophy.

Ferrier’s peculiar jokes, besides generating an initial gut-level response of laughter, can also be a quieter meditation on the nature of collecting as a compulsive drive – a magpielike, driven action of reflex that demonstrates the constant need to pick things up while moving around a city.

His wooden table is flanked by two spiky pot plants, while on the floor are several open flat wooden boxes crammed with match boxes bearing more smaller samples. The trays raise questions of classification, of how Ferrier stores and orders these samples – sorting them through place of origin, or place found, geological type, time when picked up, colour, texture, or functional use maybe.

Window here is turned into an amateur science and history museum, an outpost you might find in a small remote township, a rural display with no fancy technological gizmos, just sorted artefacts or natural objects. Something unexpected that sparks off your curiosity - that gets you to start making connections.

Newcall show

Group Show: NSFW
Newcall
6 December - 20 December 2008

This is a Christmas show that has no interest in sales. It is more a communal installation/video exhibition with a few unpriced knick/knacks in the office, a display that focuses on the architecture and history of the Newcall building, and the social interconnections between and around the nine participants who, in 2004-5, shared a large studio in Achilles House.

It is not an overly user friendly show – nothing is labelled. You have to ask the (admittedly very obliging) people minding the gallery who made what and where the artworks are. What exists is more of a collective identity where curators and artist friends are part of a team, and where on the catalogue, the work places (ie. jobs) of the participants are listed alongside their names. This is to help you grasp the imagery in a Fiona Connor video displayed in one of the studios, showing these artists’ work stations within various institutions.

The prevalent theme though is the Newcall building and the changes since it first opened as Eden House thirty years ago. To further this examination the gallery space has been physically expanded by unscrewing all the inside doors that open into recently added side-rooms (now studios) and leaning them together in the middle. This freestanding stack is another Fiona Connor artwork – where you try and see if there are ‘fake’ doors amongst the genuine. There is also a Kah Bee Chow video projected onto it of a written countdown to now of the years and months since 1978.

Within the main space is a huge drinking straw by Ben Tankard, and in the office Tankard’s other work, a video of Santa’s famous creepily beckoning finger - that scares adults more than children. The straw is next to a huge stagelike, inverted box, covered in grey carpet, by Leah Mulgrew – a piece of fluffy, tatty minimalism - and outside, hanging off the staircase landing, is a recently made Newcall sign created by Nell May.

My favourite works are the two earnest collections of weathered man-made and natural objects (one of them rocks and chunks of concrete) organised by Finn Ferrier - their classifying names dutifully written on in white ink as all good museum registration practice apparently insists. There is also a still-working commemorative ‘Eden House clock’ embedded in a brick dug up by Ferrier, and Clara Chon’s photocopied, hand-printed and coloured transcripts of mini-conversations between herself, teachers and friends. The latter’s half-uttered bits of light chat fill up several pages in a plastic folder and are entertainingly inane. They are more successful than her Ed Ruscha influenced text works currently seen across town in City Art Rooms' Young Blood Salon II show. Those seem comparatively mannered and over-thought.

You are where?

You Are Here: Fiona Connor, Finn Ferrier, Kah Bee Chow, Alex Monteith, John Ward Knox – curated by Ariane Craig-Smith

ARTSPACE, Auckland
2 February - 1 March 2008

I must be confusing it with another street name?... It happens rather often this way, that we believe in things that are quite false: it is enough that some fragment of a memory, come from elsewhere, enters into some coherent pattern open to it, or else that we unconsciously fuse two disparate halves, or still that we reverse the order of the elements in some causal system, to fashion in our minds chimerical objects, having for us all the appearances of reality.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (Djinn)

ARTSPACE’s current curatorial intern, Ariane Craig-Smith has taken an innovative approach to this ‘art mapping’ exhibition, for although it is entitled ‘You are here’ it has very little obviously in common with those city maps that feature that locating phrase, nor has it much in common with the book of that title by Kitty Harmon that deals with images made by artists incorporating maps or alluding to them.

There are no maps at all in this show, save a floor plan of ARTSPACE that shows you where the eleven works are positioned. The exhibition is more about bodily sensations of movement, movement’s traces, those speculative processes that assist us in finding a direction, and certain correlations we use to determine location. The focus is really the thinking behind maps rather than maps themselves, in particular the correlation of the indexical where connections are matched up and parallels found linking the artefact with the outside world. In other words, the nature of those representations that help us move through space and understand it.



The artworks take several approaches. Some record traces of their audience’s movement as they explore the exhibition. Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier have created a raked sand garden at the bottom of the stairs that gallery–goers step into and disturb when they go to examine Fiona Connor’s replica of the ARTSPACE circular noticeboard. Finn Ferrier has also created a fake parquet surface by stencilling a zigzag motif with varnish onto ARTSPACE’s concrete floor. Pehaps this layer will wear out as people walk over it so a path becomes detectable.



Other works, like John Ward Knox’s small biro drawings, are textured rubbings taken off embossed wallpaper. Two of these ‘correlations’ tease the audience because the top halves are identical but their bottom halves differ. They are remote cousins of Fiona Connor’s replicas of an imagined ‘ripped up’ ARTSPACE foyer staircase, mysteriously dumped in the main gallery.





Filmed records of artist movements are seen in John Ward Knox’s video of himself in Aotea Square performing like a ‘dancing bee’ various stepping movements modelled on three small drawings pinned to the wall. Similar are parts of Kah Bee Chow’s video spoof on Irma Vep and The Phantom of the Opera, especially when the catwoman-like protagonist is self consciously moving over the ARTSPACE roof. The viewer thinks of the building they are standing – or sitting – in, the movie referents for the satire, and puzzles over some Photoshopped scenes of Chow’s parents and their garden (see above) which incongruously appear as if transported from another location.




The motion of a racing motorcyclist’s body circumnavigating the Taupo Racetrack is recorded by Alex Monteith in her project that uses cameras facing both forward and backward. The resulting looped projections screened in a corner, cause a particularly physical response from the viewer, especially when the rider leans over while turning into bends. Viewers also have the opportunity to move their own vertical bodies through normally unreachable sections of the main gallery if they use a specially raised, large platform provided by Fiona Connor, Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier. Its height allows the audience to look through temporarily installed clear glass panes in the horizontal windows at the top of the walls, and study Auckland’s urban landscape afresh.

This unique chance to explore the geographical and social meanings behind ARTSPACE’s municipal location is a special self-reflexive opportunity unique to this exhibition, a declaration that subtly announces to the show’s continually changing audience that they are there – these chances are rare - so make the most of it.