William Blake visits Pakuranga

Gavin Hipkins: The Billboards Project
Te Tuhi
12 December 2009 - 7 March 2010

Hot on the tail of his ‘Bible Studies’ project at the Adam in Wellington, Gavin Hipkins presents with three billboards on a roadside wall, an aphorism from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: drive your plow over the bones of the dead.

Blake meant don’t pay too much mind clinging to past traditions, but engage instead with the present - as a proudly independent radical spirit. In his site specific version Hipkins makes it more about Auckland traffic density, local history and danger to Pakuranga pedestrians. It becomes black humour and not as Blake had it, an early Romantic, anti-Classical mini-manifesto.

When you look at this sequence of images across the street from Te Tuhi’s front door you see the background linear configurations, but not the fact that the letters are embroidered and then photographed. You also miss the fact that the Art Deco style geometric backdrops are made using a stencil-like photogram technique.

The three sequential backgrounds for the pried apart, 3-word phrases are: a diamond in front of a rectangular frame; a sun with radiating slat-like beams; a Spirographic rosette. When combined with the intact grim message these decorative motifs (and folksy stitching) seem incongruously frivolous, if not comical, their delicate filigree at odds with the pragmatic 'get on with it' imperative.

Poor old William Blake, suffering the indignity of being processed through a classic post-modern filter and having his liberating, iconoclastic credo chopped up and wildly recontextualised so. Like his mad subject, King Nebuchadnezzar, I weep for him.

Joys of inversion

Gavin Hipkins: Second Empire
Lopdell House, Titirangi
14 February -13 April 2008

Recently I discussed the glassed-over and framed Hipkins show at Starkwhite but these works by that artist in the Second Empire series are quite different. They are printed into canvas and presented as a sort of painting, much as Paul Hartigan has done with his H-Types of digitally tweaked Polaroids, which were originally taken in the seventies to document New Zealand street-signage.

The eight Hipkins works at Lopdell House though are historical, line engraved book illustrations reversed into negative, and inverted. The superimposed embroidered patches are brighter in hue, and to me, not as funny or as subtle as the text based works with birds and reptiles. The patches are clearly thematic. For example, for inverted river scenes we have a canoe or leaping salmon, and for a railway vista we have a St. Andrew’s cross of monkey wrenches.

These images are bigger and so, more physical in their presence. The inversion makes you work a little harder for, as negative topsy-turvy images they are very abstract and initially chaotic. But you still get drawn in, especially with no glass. You need to study the background before examining the fabric patch.

Mostly though they are enigmatic, remaining mysterious. The inversion encourages confusion and mistaken interpretations of imagery, pushing you into tangled skeins of ambiguity. Mischievous stuff.

Woolly Bully

Gavin Hipkins; Natural HistoryStarkwhite, Auckland
1 February - 1 March 2008

Upstairs in one of the small Starkwhite ‘boudoirs’, Gavin Hipkins has an exhibition of nine of his latest photographs, using a Victorian salon hang on one wall with a pale green backdrop. His photos are digitally mixed hybrids that blend images from a natural history book of wildlife engravings with fabric patches of written verbal phrases, designed to be sewn on to clothing.

The merging is very clever indeed. The engraved illustrations, printed off metal plates, have been made ‘negative’ so that darks become light again, and lights dark. The result makes the images look like woven material, so when the photographed patches are superimposed over the pictures they look natural. It is not a forced pairing but a very smooth transition.

Not only do the images have a fabric-like quality but Hipkins’ colour choices are beautifully understated and subtle. The chroma is really knocked back so that it is delicate and nicely mixed into a range of similarly toned greys.

As for the aphorisms, when placed alongside the animal imagery they become very droll: a flock of pelicans in the branches of trees above the heads of menacing crocodiles / stay disconnected; a moorhen gingerly striding through a marsh / experience uncertainty; a nest of rattlesnakes / worse than ever; three owls in a tree / think ordinary; vultures picking at a carcass / lower standard.

This is a very good show from Hipkins, one of his best. Sensual, witty and innovative, make sure you catch it.