If it is

Fiona Amundsen and Tim Corballis: Si C’est
Te Tuhi Billboard Project
8 March – 19 July 2009

Three hoardings on the street on a wall opposite the front entrance to Te Tuhi. Two are large photographs by Fiona Amundsen of the part of the Auckland waterfront once called the 'Tank Farm’. The one of the far right is a text by Tim Corballis, a couple of fictitious transcribed conversations set in the future (next month) – about listeners not attending to – or grasping - what they are being told. There has been an accident in a nearby boat and they are oblivious.

Amundsen’s images look very different this size, a large 12 x 15 foot rectangle for each. They are unusual for her. Slightly painterly the colours are especially seductive, as if they were oil paint – particularly in the reflective water of the harbour. The weave of the plastic fabric brings a glowing but delicately gridded light into the colour and not onto it. Secondary and tertiary hues play off against the strident primaries.

For Amundsen the chroma is strikingly sensual. There is a generosity with this scale and its impact on colour not found within her earlier work in galleries or publications. The middle image is crystal clear and utterly gorgeous, while the one on the left has a deliciously fuzzy boat bobbing around blurrily in the water. A real celebration.

Inebriated power poles

Frank Breuer: Ascetic Monumentality
McNamara Gallery, Whanganui
1 November - 29 November 2008

At the moment in Whanganui Paul McNamara is showing in his unusual, domestic feeling gallery - converted from a doctor’s surgery that was converted from a bungalow - two shows: Frank Breuer and Fiona Amundsen, in adjacent rooms. Amundsen’s is very similar to her recent show at Gus Fisher. Breuer has never shown in Aotearoa before. Both are big admirers of the German photo-conceptualists, Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous in the sixties for their documentation of cooling towers. Breuer was one of their last students.

Breuer’s images are slightly smaller than Amundsen’s; more vertical in format. Their subject matter is power poles, centrally positioned each time and often flanked by large brick buildings in which the great acuity of detail allows you to scrutinize each brick, if you so desire.

Amundsen’s images are very strictly controlled, but Breuer’s images (illustrated above) are even more austere, particularly with his more limited colour range. Like her he favours overcast skies, but usually he has pale dusty grey streets as well. There is no lush greenery, or icy cool colouration.

I don’t think it is intended but I find some of these power poles incredibly amusing. They have an anthropomorphic quality, where they take on human personalities. Some are untidy, or tilted, and look as if they are about to topple over like staggering drunkards. Others are formal, straight and prim, like military officers standing in line at attention.

Breuer’s images are also more obviously beautiful than Amundsen’s. There is a hint of a constructivist aesthetic about them (with their linear components and warm hues) and less process driven. Both artists make wonderful photographs and it is terrific that McNamara has introduced Breuer and his work (he has been on a speaking tour) to New Zealand audiences.

Those miraculous Koreans

Fiona Amundsen: Miracle on the Han River
Gus Fisher
17 October – 22 November 2008

Fiona Amundsen’s display of seven Chromira photographs in the small Gus Fisher room is based on her recent residency in Seoul. In her typical manner they are cool but incredibly still images of social spaces where people are eliminated - through the slow exposures being taken early in the morning. However for the first time in her work that I’ve seen, there are occasional faint traces of distant figures.

Amundsen’s control is such that all these extremely sharp, detailed, urban images look like they were taken on the same day, though their titles show that is far from the case. They all have bleached, white skies and a soft, very even light. Her images are devoid of any romantic seduction through hue, or appeal to tourist interests. The work looks industrial in method. As figurative images go, they have an icy, abstract ambience, yet they don’t exhaust the viewer’s interest. There is lots to see and think about in each frame.

Like the works of the LA conceptualist, Christopher Williams, who employs other photographers to make his images, Amundsen’s own images are precise in their manipulation of chroma. In this suite the oranges and greens are intensely saturated, just as such colours normally are on an overcast day, with our retinal rods and cones creating in crepuscular light, what is called the Purkinje effect.

All the images of the architecture surrounding the Han River’s tributary the Cheonggyecheon - with its water turned to silk by the slow shutter speed - have a strangely subtle tonal blend so that the silhouetted edges look vaguely collagelike and forms flatten. Especially where the dynamics of perspective are not dominant.

Amundsen’s photographs are not of environments that are hyper-dense in buildings and advertising. You don’t get a dominant picture-plane in your face, cluttered with facades and neon. She likes to include air and roomy physical space so that the shown vistas meet halfway between ‘the concrete jungle’ and idyllic fields. They are never claustrophobic, or agoraphobic either. Only rich as a series of cross-sectioned views of South Korean social change, history and economic progress (the latter is the economic miracle the exhibition’s title refers to) – and, more particularly, image as constructed artefact.