Moving and disintegrating images

7:5 (seven films by five artists)
Two Rooms
19 August - 9 September 2009

This group show (now over) downstairs at Two Rooms featured short films - sometimes loops - by Clinton Watkins, Gregory Bennett, Judy Darragh, Dorota Mytych and Alex Monteith.

Monteith had the advantage of having the video room out the back all to herself, showing a work previously seen at St. Paul St of different Moto-X riders making tracks up and down a huge dune at Ahipara - as if it were a massive sheet of finely grained drawing paper. With Monteith the whining crackling staccato of the engines was a big component of the pleasure (and humour) she provided, along with three quarter angle photography that could almost be aerial.

Gregory Bennett’s animated films often seem to illustrate some futuristic theme where solitary individuals no longer exist, humans being only capable of moving in unison - like ants that share a common mind. His recent work is now more concerned with simple geometry than it was previously when it was more narrative-based. Densely packed rings of humanoids move their limbs and torsos in co-ordinated unison, opening and closing, like an awakening bud. Bennett is really a choreographer of digital dance, a designer of beautiful (but simple) communal actions.

Clinton Watkins’ slow moving loops of a galloping horse and swinging light shade hypnotically caressed your retinas, while teasing you into searching for the minute jump where each cycle restarted. The gentle pulse from the rocking light, and the flickering space between flailing equine limbs and distant background, held your interest - keeping you from leaving.

Judy Darragh’s video of 365 daily ‘Rorschach tests’ of symmetrically patterned, coloured ink drawings, were a little like Julia Morison’s erotic ink folds (seen in the second most recent Auckland Triennial) but less vaginal and more like butterflies. They had a horizontal, not vertical, format, and were made after giving birth to a child. Darragh’s metaphor of a butterfly thus seemed appropriate. The light of these delicately transparent drawings became particularly intense when enlarged and converted to video, causing the chromatic saturation of the ink to seem to fade. It was a clever idea to put them in a slowly morphing sequence.

The theme of metamorphosis was also apparent in Polish artist Dorota Mytych’s spectacular videos of images made of tea leaves. These, after a stationary period, then became scattered as if blown by a large fan. Though an obvious reference to the transience of existence, her fleeting portraits and figures also alluded to the fortunes of the planet, grim augurs for our species’ future.

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.)

Swarms of little men

Gregory Bennett: Blacknoise
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
27 March -26 April 2008

Blacknoise presents a dark sci-fi fantasy of a world dominated by thousands of digitally created, shavenheaded young males, all athletic, supple and eternally energetic, swarming over public spaces and all they come across - even floating in the ether itself. The handful of women who are shown are on their backs on beds in buildings. The work seems to have satirical intent.

The imagery though is not violent. The figures are often configured in flailing towerlike structures, practicing a form of gymnastics where forms open and shut like flowers. They exercise tirelessly. Only women sleep. The guys keep on moving.

You have to get up close to see these works. From a distance they seem to be like the holistic brush-marks of Mark Tobey. They could almost be maggots, all writhing in a field. Closer still you might think they are scrambling people from the mescaline visions of Henri Michaux. In fact they are like Lilliputian armies created by Pixar studios, stills made in anticipation of some big screened production, with test samples moving on LEDs.

Maybe Bennett should make such a film. The stills have a steely, Escher-like iciness, especially in the architectural drawings. Although incredibly detailed, these might become tiresome. Because all the figures are the same, the interest is in how the plethora of individuals is grouped, how Bennett clusters them. Real time movement however, would really enhance the motion already implied.

Bennet is no colourist for his harsh blacks, greys and reds make the images optically piercing. But as an unusual fantasy the content of his work is intriguing. Hopefully it will lead to something more ambitious.