Optically gently abrasive

Taking a Line
Vavasour Godkin group show
11 September - 18 October 2008

This is a standard group show from Vavasour Godkin with regulars like Hemer, Parkes, Jansen and Thornley making their usual appearances. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. These four really come up with the goods. Hemer and Jansen especially.

Andre Hemer, while instantly identifiable by his yellow/orange palette and masking methodology, keeps changing his painted forms and the shapes of his supports. The tondo here dazzles with its negative canvas vegetation and unfurling ribbons, while the smaller rectangle seems to be making jokes about Clement Greenberg’s favourite painter, Morris Louis, and his vertical stains. If you ever saw a stain in a Hemer painting you’d be needing an opthamologist.

Down the other end of the room is an evanescent pencil dot drawing by Monique Jansen that looks like a screen door or enlarged section of photo-hoarding. It is wonderfully ethereal with its floating unanchored forms, as is a borrowed Agnes Martin drawing of carefully spaced horizontal lines, popped into the show.

Also inserted (but NFS) is one of the best ever Gordon Walters paintings you are ever likely to see. Karaka II (1980) is unusually large for Walters, being particularly muscular in its organisation of pulsing korus, and with their bulbs being especially large. This strident work is pilgrimage material for out-of-town Walters fans.

Miranda Parkes’ billowing painting of vertical pink stripes has a raw red painted across some horizontal crevices, adding an effective counter-structure to the projecting form. It resonates well with the adjacent Geoff Thornley. Flat and long, its horizontal wooden boards have been lathed into stacks of gouged furrows that have then been painted.

Gregory Bennett’s digital animation is on four small LED screens placed on a shelf, showing aerial views of marching soldiers. Some parade in grids, and others are in spiralling rows, all flippantly satirising military precision.

Angela Brennan, Sarah Hughes and Melinda Harper use colour in a more abandoned sense, either within soft lines featuring raggedy or smeared edges (Brennan) or angular forms that are super saturated and abrasively optical (Hughes and Harper).

Overall this show is an odd selection, for its range is too wide. The subtly restrained and gentle works don’t sit well with the eye-poppers. Nevertheless, for the Walters, Hemers and Jansen alone, well worth a trip down High St.

Reaction Replay

Fast Forward
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
20 November 2007 – 9 February 2008

This group show of thirteen works from nine artists is a good mix of different generations. Geoff Thornley goes back to the seventies and Petar/James gallery, while Andrew Drummond is an important figure in the history of this country’s performance art, especially also of the seventies. Plus there is a John Panting linear ‘suspension’ sculpture as well from that time – a late addition that looks a bit cramped near the wall, but very unusual. (Here is an image from the VG archives.)


The two large Thornley abstractions look better here than they did in his recent Gus Fisher show. They need lots of wall space and the chance to draw you in close when you are ready. Their fascinating synthesis of canvas with board plays with prepositions like ‘above’ or ‘under’ in their interaction. Unlike related artists such as Kelly (shaped canvases) or Mangold (shapes on canvas), with Thornley you examine the bevelled edge of the hardboard contours or cut out holes and think about their planar surfaces and implied spatial twists.




Andrew Drummond presents a suite of four documentary images from his 1978 Ngaraunga Set of performances at the Artists Co-op in Wellington. (I think Ngauranga is the correct spelling, but both are prevalent on the web even though they would be pronounced quite differently.) Drummond has made inkjet images from slides taken of his actions in the spacious co-operative, performances that referred to the demolished Ngauranga freezing works, that spoke of a ‘conversation’ between him and the slaughtered animals. (This example below is not in the show.)


I personally don’t feel comfortable with the Beuysian shamanism here, but they are fascinating images from an ideologically innocent era. In his excellent article on Drummond in Art New Zealand Wystan Curnow talks of the images being artworks in themselves (‘the documentation is not for the record, it is the work’) but times have changed and today’s digital technology forces us to reassess all that. I think the performances have an ontology irrespective of the static photographs or the filmed video Drummond also made, and can’t be replaced by the images.


Speaking of digital technology and video, Gregory Bennett’s two small screens of moving animated figures are interesting. The lefthand LED shows two humanoids (male and female) joined at the lower chest that twist and turn as they enter each other’s torso and pull apart. They are like a cyber version of some of Marina and Ulay Abramovic’s seventies performance works where the two artist-lovers are physically joined by their breathing mouths or hair, and strain to separate before merging together again. The other righthand screen in contrast shows small figures in a circle performing ritualistic dances and creating expanding and contracting, kaleidoscopic configurations.

Back to the abstract paintings in the show, André Hemer’s work is immensely beguiling, with its pool of exactly repeatable splashes, scrawled loops and swirls – each carefully computer cut in its paint-masking process and juxtaposed with an occasional dollop of collage. And carefully controlled so the elements don’t lose their clarity and smother each other.


Matthew Dowman’s large stretchers are related to the work of Seung Yul Oh, but bigger, less intimate and less comic based. They have less allusion, and added graffiti spray - and are reliant on a dominant colour for their mood, making them more conventionally abstract and physical.

Miranda Parkes has three works here. Of these, the most intriguing is the biggest one. Its scale lets her experiment with different grids, daubs and splashes, all mixed up on the one large, crumpled, billowing canvas surface.


The last two works are slightly different from the others. There is a delicate fragility within Lianne Edwards’ grid of used penny postage stamps, for the individual stickers are pinned up like collected insects, and create through repetition a gridded version of Elizabeth Thomson's much larger metal sculptures of insects. These are stamps though and their shadows push them out so they hover in space like a suspended plane.


Monique Jansen’s framed sheet of obsessive rows of very fine pencil lines shimmers optically, and looks as if it has been drawn with a machine. The lines look like regularly undulating strata of hair-thin crêpes, or layers of large peeled off skins in cross-section. Impossible to photograph, they demand close proximity to appreciate.