Jeena Shin's stairwell wall

Jeena Shin
ARTSPACE stairwell Project
2009 – 2011

Jeena Shin is known for her fastidious wall paintings and portable panels that feature tightly interlocking or overlapping triangular shapes, all rendered with tonally matched sets of some selected hue. They look like fractals or tangrams masked off with tape so that the edges of the painted geometrical forms have become raised.

This particular work is sited on a high wall adjacent to a staircase that provides the entrance to Auckland’s ARTSPACE. Since the project began in 2009, Shin has been working on it in occasional (and deliberately unpredictable) bursts, devising complex evanescent configurations in light tones of grey, and later adding slightly darker geometric forms on top. The underlayers are never obliterated totally because of the ridges of the edges – brought out by the light raking across them from the two skinny vertical windows facing K’ Rd.

The result is a strangely unstable tension between flickering tonal triangles or diamonds lying over faintly visible pin-lined edges of painted forms that look like glued-on sheets of angularly cut paper. The two levels work independently of each other, sometimes hovering or floating free, or often interwoven and locked together. Overall – bearing in mind it is impossible to stand back and survey the wall in its entirety – there is a sense of faceted and tumbling flat prisms spreading out across the vertical, rectangular plane like a tree of multiplying crystal slivers, sometimes in sync with the layers beneath, sometimes contrary to them.

Besides having little space to move away from it in, the wall itself is an oddly awkward, lopsided shape that surprisingly, instead of being a nuisance, gives Shin an advantage. Its very eccentricity, with two very different viewing spots at top and bottom - and the diagonal stairs in between - allows her to create a striking downward movement with paler but modulated negative forms. A more obvious and more exciting dynamic appears here than with conventional rectangular formats. ‘Dead’ non gallery spaces such as this may be where her talent shines most.

The images above are not much help unless you have a very clean computor screen which is large. The tones on the wall are very subtle.

Shin exhibition

Jeena Shin: Fractus
Two Rooms
16 October - 14 November 2009

Upstairs in the narrower and smaller of the two Two Rooms galleries, Jeena Shin presents a long thin painting extending horizontally along the main wall. At first glance black, it really consists of variations of dark grey, a ribbon of folding and unravelling tangrams - made up of differently toned triangles - that skirts the edges of a skinny poised oblong that could be an elegant hovering beam, a recessed slot, or an ebony rectangular sash – even a silken belt.

The tumbling pyramids within it are small on the far left, rapidly increasing in size (while becoming flatter) towards the middle and then decreasing a little over to the right. The spatial properties of these crisply delineated geometric forms are designed to flicker and twist, yet they also depend very much on the changing hourly light, darkening and deepening as the day progresses.

Despite the elegance of the narrow composition that overall is perfectly positioned on the long wall, the fact that Shin has used five hardboard panels creates a problem, for they should align perfectly butted together - but they don’t (though it is hard to tell from the above photograph). The edges aren’t flush. This makes you wish she had painted it directly onto the wall as in the recent Adam show, or currently in the ARTSPACE stairwell. It would look sensational: a long black strip embedded into the Two Rooms architecture.

There are two dilemmas here: Firstly the panels are not perfectly identical in measurement. It is not as if they are and have been hung poorly. It is the height discrepancy in one which though small, in this kind of pristine practice is a serious disaster. Secondly, maybe panels with a palpable thickness are the wrong option. Perhaps Shin should have painted on metal sheets that hardly project out from the surface of the wall at all. Or as I’ve said, worked on the wall directly. The gallery can still sell such a project adapted for other walls and other sites, if salability is an issue.

Yet for all that, this flawed work is still worth seeing. For this artist, Fractus 2009 is unusual because of the range of shape sizes within its unravelling concertina strip, and the way the dark negative shapes on its upper and lower edges interact with similarly angular ones in the centre. Plus there are also unexpected surprises in the detail, such as series of spikey star-shapes on the left-hand side, and a flattening of less solid forms on the right. Oddly the coal coloured, crystalline forms get localised within the stratalike horizontal structure, as if some sort of bizarrely twisting, geological process is slowly at work. A lot to think about.

On Adam's walls

Wall Works
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
8 September – 4 October 2009

The notion of drawing or painting directly onto the gallery wall has been with us for at least forty years now, probably becoming most well known with the practice of Sol Lewitt. For this method, Tina Barton has picked an unusual group of artists to work on the Adam Art Gallery walls, eight individuals some of which you and I would be unlikely to predict: David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison, Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, and Jeena Shin.

For the first half of the show the gallery was opened so that the visiting public could observe the artists constructing their artworks. If you click on the link here you can examine nineteen slides showing samples of the processes involved. (Put your cursor on one image and lefthand click halfway down the righthand edge to change it).

Barton has come up with a terrifically inventive eight-unit combination. The big surprises are Cauchi to install graffiti in the two toilets, Paterson to screen a DVD loop in the dark walled, rubber-floored ‘dungeon’, and Harrison to paint on a large moveable wall by the entrance. Inspired choices.

David Cauchi’s contribution is a revelation – far funnier and classier than what you’d pick up from his blogsite. His use of the orange and green planar surfaces of the Ladies and Gents on which to place withering (often appropriated) comments on idealism, art world participants, liberal democracy and our meaningless lives in general make him a sort of Aztec-obsessed Keith Haring–meets-Emil Cioran, and are so entertaining (though he’s serious in his unrelenting scorn of anything and everything, not trying to get laughs) that his incessant but earnest quips could turn you into a compulsive dunny loiterer.

Reuben Paterson’s black and white film on a pearlescent glittery screen celebrates a queer politic in its furtive, bunkerlike space and bombarding central-state imagery. The flashing, pulsing sequences of kaleidoscopic patterns expand and contract, spin and tilt; hurling you through the screen at unexpected speeds - via different jarring scales - to explore delicate geometric snowflakes and dotty asymmetrical Brownian motion. It is difficult to leave the space because you keep discovering new shapes and tumbling axial alignments you had never previously noticed.

The tunnelling physicality of Paterson’s project has similarities with Kim Pieters’ towering and shimmering wall paintings of cascading pale blue and creamy dribbles on the staircase. These gorgeous surfaces evoke the Sublime and force your eye to rush to the ceiling and its corners, seeking out strategically positioned, negatively-shaped drip-free zones that allow planar respite.

Similarly vertical linear qualities, but much finer and graphic – not overtly painted - are also apparent in Julia Morison’s multi-panelled Myriorama mural that descends down the wall under the Adam’s infamous Athfield-designed floor/ceiling slot. Her columns of 106 portable and reusable panels, each with a gently mottled background overlayed with one of thirty-two repeatable permutations of entangled or parallel lines, drop down or traverse three linked walls, and play off against two thick black parallel bands that bisect the high planes.

Simon Morris and Jeena Shin use only one wall each. With Morris’ looping grid of pale yellow ochre lines you can see where the tone and saturation levels vary, and how – using templates not pencil – the artist has gradually built up the horizontal structure. You can also see how in the first half he has added extra lines, doubling back in reverse to create a denser complexity. The occasional ball within the transparent trajectories indicates where the tips of adjacent lines have overlapped, providing clues to where certain sections of pathway have shared common routes.

Jeena Shin’s large mural features tumbling tangram-like forms of overlapping rectangles and triangles in glossy grey on a matt white plane. The occasional fine ridge shows traces of her process as she modifies the angular geometric rhythms and descending negative gaps. The evanescent forms are getting larger for this artist, becoming more robust, more strident and less delicate.

Michael Harrison’s work on a movable rectangular wall is a comparatively simple composition that shows a small red cat suspended within the larger negative silhouette of an open-mouthed Alsatian where the curved arabesqued contours of the feline tail and canine jaws play off amusingly against each other. It is fascinating to see Harrison deal with this uncharacteristic scale and successfully resolve any formal or technical problems.

Patrick Lundberg’s project involves thinking about the site specific peculiarities of the wall fittings and architectural fittings around the top of the stairs, using a repertoire of generic pencil lines (repeatable with tracing paper) similar to those used by Sol Lewitt. You have to look closely to see them and how Lundberg refers to various wall edges, ceiling planes, bookcase corners, light fittings and banisters.

This show looks excellent now, but I saw it last weekend at the time of the Adam’s Tenth Anniversary Party. For that event Barton had commissioned temporary structures designed and built by second year students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design to be placed inside or next to the installations by the eight artists I’ve just discussed. The result was a political, aesthetic and conceptual disaster, making many of the artists furious that their projects were interfered with at a time when many out-of–town visitors had come to see the show. It was sad to see such curatorial blundering - though thankfully, only short-term.

Tumbling but static tangram grays

Jeena Shin: Fractus
Te Tuhi
7 March - 19 July 2009

This wall painting of Jeena Shin’s is carefully rendered in five closely related tones of grey. Almost a monotone it is never bland.In fact it is highly energized, with light raking across raised edges that have been deliberately caused by brushing paint towards (and not away from) now absent, meticulously positioned, masking tape.

The 'colours' are Kodak greys and the wall looks as if it could be a photograph. At first glance you think the configurations are regular, as if a template from a pattern, but it is soon clear that is not the case. Each one is uniquely tilted, and the spaces between them all differ.

A small mural like this insists that the viewer look closely at its clusters of spikey shard-like formations - so they can grasp the uniqueness of each section of angular-shaped wall surface, its shifting tonal variations that still appear static.

That it is not a painting on a stretcher elicits a different response than from a support with a thickness. The fine ridges provide a drama separate from the precisely mixed tonal control. We see two parallel systems of manipulating light, one fixed once the acrylic on the wall is dry, the other evanescent, beholden to sculptural relief considerations, and dependent on the weather and the hour.

(Working study above.)

Sophisticated drawings

Works on Paper: Kevin Appel, Joachim Bandau, Frank Gerritiz, Jane Harris, Noel Ivanoff, Simon Morris, Geena Shin
Two Rooms
30 January - 28 February 2009

This is a tightly selected show that uses the whole gallery, with Frank Gerritiz providing some ‘drawings’ in the traditional sense of leaded graphite on paper, and Geena Shin and Kevin Appell creating collages. Joachim Bandou and Jane Harris explore the limitations of watercolour inside demarcated, repeated shapes that overlap – as does Simon Morris with liquid acrylic – while Noel Ivanoff makes ‘paintings’ in a sticky Judy Millarish way, with viscous coloured substance stamped with a grinding disc onto free-hanging sheets of dacron. Only three of the seven artists here are Kiwis.

In this shrewd, elegant and varied exhibition stock is made fresh in a new context. The works interact beautifully, with many cross connections made via similar colours and use of negative shape.

The most obsessively fastidious works are Gerritz’s carefully positioned squares and rectangles. These meticulous black blocks are stacks of dark rippling lines measured into thirds or sixths of the pages’ surface area. The harshness of the precise edges created by this German artist could lacerate your eyeball if you lingered too long over their razor-sharp, geometric contours. The mottled pencil lines seduce with their subtle horizontal wobbling motion and beguiling depth.

Geena Shin’s angular tangram forms are less optically stable, not being anchored with a sense of weight. Their pointy diamond forms seem to flutter and flip across the page, being like Gerritz ultra crisp, and exploiting negative gaps. Carefully pre-planned, these are made with rigorously positioned, glued on, painted card.

Whilst this is clearly an ‘abstraction’ show that examines nuances of surface, it is not only preoccupied with figure-ground relationships of shape or suggested volumetric form. Simon Morris and Noel Ivanoff deal with these, and the concept of process-driven time as well. Both use wormlike shapes that meander across the page, rising and descending - and stopping when they seem about to double back.

Morris’s inventive stencil-based configurations explore a delicate and flat, thick twisting line that snares unexpected but repeated white shapes within its airy looping course. Ivanoff’s line though is much fatter and denser. Because it is created from a printed disc application of slimy coloured pigment it looks telescopic and modelled, like a ventilation tube. It is squeezed into a compressed structure where negative forms cannot be a consideration.

These works have a nice looseness as well: Ivanoff where the squashed paint has oozed out and thickened beyond the confines of the overlapping, pressing circle, and Morris with the occasional flick of dripped paint. British artist Jane Harris capitalises further on such accidents, mixing her watercolour pigments in subtle chromatic combinations and placing them in rows of overlapping elongated ovals so that the drying hues start to separate and form dark surging waves peeking through paler fields.

There is another German artist in this show besides Gerritz, mentioned earlier. Joachim Bandau exploits the properties of diluted black pigment and only that, his overlapping rectangular washes looking like aerial views of stacked up sheets of tinted glass. Each faint rectangle has a thin undulating edge, a tiny line of linear black residue, and the ones in the centre, being positioned over many more layers, are darker and deeper in dramatic depth.

Upstairs the collages by American artist Kevin Appel show us his interest in synthetic cubism and architectural forms. On one wall his pencil drawings of patterned sheltering planes, airily aligned within the branches of trees, amuse with their whimsical inventiveness. On the other, appropriated photographs of landscapes have tent or hut forms inserted, with similarly decorative planes. This floor is in marked contrast to the austerity and lack of ornamentation on the ground floor below. Unlike the other artists, Appel’s work has a celebratory exuberance, a joyfulness in decoration, possibly even prettiness – without getting wild. It is still intrinsically cool.

Summing up, overall the works in this show are strictly controlled - with nothing really too abandoned or remotely frenetic. Yet though there is an emphasis on craft and technique, it somehow sustains interest without drifting into dry exercises or showing off. The visual properties, often fluid in the physicality of the medium, greatly intrigue. In their clever combinations of sensibility, they compel further looking.

[In descending order, the illustrated works above are by Frank Gerritz, Geena Shin, Simon Morris, Noel Ivanoff, Jane Harris, Joachim Bandau and Kevin Appel.]