Enjoying the light

John Ward Knox: a projection of light
Newcall
6 March - 13 March 2010

Only a week long, this short Newcall show by John Ward Knox involves a minimal installation, a couple of photographs and some potential socialising. The T-shaped gallery is apparently empty - apart from a group of three or four chairs and a box that serves as a table for some biscuits. It anticipates some chat over a nibble and a cuppa, if the visitor is so inclined. This furniture is by the far wall opposite the glass door.

There is no electric light and the large windows by the entrance (facing north) are all uncovered so that daylight ‘projects’ in – direct sunlight or glare reflected off buildings or the sky. Because light cannot bend around corners, the smaller, inner, rectangular space extending to the side of the main gallery is much darker.

This arrangement emphasises the light coming in the window and changing over the passing of the day. This point is emphasised by the artist installing two photos of a cloudless sky, taken two hours apart at Miranda on the Coromandel Peninsula, with the lighter one placed on a light wall, and the much darker one on the darkest wall. Their presence seems to serve as signs to visitors to be mindful of the changing illuminative properties and how they effect the room’s architectural features. It also makes sense considering the artist’s interest in Seurat-like biro drawing and undulating sculptures carved directly into plaster-covered walls.

John Ward Knox seems to offering an immersive phenomenological experience where the role of ‘spectator’ and ‘art object’ breaks down, where the very act of visiting as a participatory element contributes to a total environment. Any conversation had with the Newcall gallery minder or other visitors feeds into this. The three ‘items’ of gallery light, photographs and conversation are more calculated and cohesive than what was at first apparent.

That might be a weakness, for it could be that the relational aspects overstate the obvious and that a quietistic private experience with just the light and space and photographs is sufficient. However we are not living in the seventies: the drinks and food are pragmatic and encourage lingering and return visits. A shrewd strategy.

Contemporary Physicals

Modern Physics: Alex Monteith, Bas Jan Ader, Eddie Clemens, Hanna Schwarz, John Ward Knox, Philip Dadson, Shaun Gladwell. Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
10 October – 29 November 2009

The moving mass of a muscular human body is the theme of this mainly video international exhibition: firstly in how it senses its external relationship to its immediate spatial environment; secondly how it is internally aware of its own various extended components.

Such phenomenological themes might sound a bit dry, but in this show they are not at all. It is an inspired piece of curating by Stephen Cleland where the assembled artworks are deftly positioned in a convincingly cohesive sequence, and where there is an abundance of humour and aural and visual delight. This exhibition is so intriguing and so full of pleasant surprises you won’t want to leave.

In a newly furbished space opposite the Te Tuhi entrance Shaun Gladwell’s stunning video installation presents an inverted film of Og de Souza, a Brazilian skateboarder with stunted legs, sitting cross-legged on his board as he races through a carpark upside down - propelled only by his exceptionally strong arms. This imagery (with audio) is a foil to another (silent) film screened simultaneously at rightangles on another wall. In a nightclub in front of a bar, the glamorous leggy transvestite Grace O’Hara, an erotic pole dancer, gyrates alone in a tasselled bikini and high heels.

The contrasts between these two films (both with dominant horizon lines) are utterly absorbing: one with pulsing strobe-lights, other lit soft and even; the strip club with reflective steel, the carpark with matt concrete; the dancer leggy, the skateboarder legless; a ‘naked’ black ‘female’, a clothed white male; 'she' is upright, he inverted; one comparatively stationary, the other ‘pursuing’ at speed; the club referencing Francis Bacon’s theatrical cages, the boardrider alluding to Velasquez’s court dwarves.

In the rest of Te Tuhi, in the main viewing area that you access between the bookshop and the library, are works by the six other artists. Just inside the double-glass doors are three b/w seventies videos by the legendary Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader (1942 -1975), exploring the body’s limitations with gravity. They try to hilariously construct T-shapes by attempting equilibrium.

In one film he tries to balance a large slab of concrete high up in the air on one hand while standing above glowing light bulbs positioned on the floor; in another he attempts to hang vertically from a tree branch over a running stream; in the third he tries to balance on his right leg so his left leg and torso are horizontal. In all three, gravity inevitably defeats him. These actions seem on film to be Buster Keatonish – funny but tragic. Even Bas Jan Ader’s most famous image, of him weeping with tears trickling down his face, is connected to the themes of failure and gravity.

Nearby Cleland has positioned another b/w film, a recent, very elegant work by German artist Hanna Schwarz. It shows her dressed in white shirt, androgynous eighties rockstar haircut, grey jeans and boots, making quick walking motions or foot actions, or holding careful Nijinsky-like positions with her torso, head and arms in profile like a hieroglyphic. These sections are all sequenced to be accompanied by a soundtrack of tap dancing or clacking temple blocks, sometimes in sync, but mostly not. Often she takes up minotaur poses with her head pulled under and her arms extended like horns. With the soundtrack the images have a Spanish flavour.

In one scene, she like Bas Jan Ader, balances on one leg, not frontally, but like a reaching ice skater – in profile. In another she adopts a golf putting pose. Tongue in cheek humour permeates every image she presents.

With the room of installed ‘dematerialised’ sculptures by John Ward Knox we move from a trajectory of sequential filmic experiences (where we are stationary) to an awareness of our own bodily movements. We now circle within a space shared with understated static objects that modify the architecture - and so lock into our own perceptions of form, light, shadow, as demonstrated by his intervening materials that play with the sides and corners of the classic white cube.

Using the first gallery wall just inside the door, Ward Knox mocks the materiality of paint by carving into plaster on its surface to render in relief a slashing streaky mark made by a horizontally moving housepainting brush. It also has little vertical dribbles running off its bottom edge. Gentle plasticity, light and shadow create this shallow-relief, meticulously sanded drawing that forces us to closely examine the brightly-lit wall’s plane and the subtle projection of its surface.

The two corners Ward Knox treats with bent wire and delicate silver chain, one with the two joined to form a continuous arabesque, the other with the two curved materials straddling the gap between the intersecting planes separately. Shadow in this artist’s hands becomes another substance which accentuates traces from materials that in bright light almost become invisible.

Nextdoor inside the main Te Tuhi gallery space, we find spotlit in its centre a small circular wooden stage with steps. This serves as a seat for the huge five screen Alex Monteith panorama on three walls, and is also the platform for the Eddie Clemens interactive kinetic sculpture.

In its middle is a spinning Scalextric slot-car track, complete with mini safety fence that surrounds a bowl of black oil. The track starts moving when you step on to the stairs. On its upper curved slot is a small blue and white sedan (with its own tiny orange light under its chassis) that moves independently of the backwards turning track – so that it can even accelerate forwards faster.

Clemens’ project is mesmerising through the way you automatically attempt to analyse the paradoxical relationship of the moving track with the motion of the toy car, but in the context that Cleland has constructed around it, it also becomes a brilliant metaphor for the movement of the viewer doing the circuit in the Modern Physics space. A witty, schematicised, God’s eye view.

It is also a perfect foil to the spectacular acrobatics of the Monteith display, with the five cameras set looking out over each of the five pilot’s tracer streaming tails as the RNZAF Red Checkers stunt team perform a highly choreographed series of double loops, barrel rolls and ‘spaghetti-breaks’ – all co-ordinated with synchronised sound and simultaneous action.

The synchronised DVD loops start when the five planes take off in sequence and finishes after they’ve landed and manoeuvred to park on the runway. Not only is the work’s churning visceral sensation extraordinary (though personally I found the ‘firecracker’ aural component of her motorbike videos at AUT last year more bodily penetrating) but the colourful cloudscape and changing light is rivetting.

Philip Dadson’s DVD project is also aeronautically focussed, but using balloons - not speeding aircraft. Part of a much bigger version he made last year with seventeen colourful balloons and twenty-four musicians, this small two channel version with two balloons (and six green uniformed brass band members) focuses on the aerially viewed patchwork landscape more than the much faster Monteith work, with the two cameras aimed either across or down.

The thin, mournful, drawn out notes of the musical performances from tuba, trombone and trumpet players, with little melodic variation, make Dadson’s hovering music quite haunting. Like the leisurely moving balloons the music gently drifts - sometimes stopping, then restarting. Occasionally he has dubbed undertoning over the brass, using his own voice.

Dadson’s two screens are positioned at rightangles to each other, like the screens in the Gladwell work. In fact his moving coloured aerial images fit perfectly in the sequence between the Monteith and the Gladwell works, cleverly completing the ambulatory loop. Cleland has come up with something exceptional with this very special Te Tuhi show. All the individual ingredients individually and collectively add up to a great total experience. Everything is strong and memorable. A wonderful treat that you would be an absolute nitwit to miss.

Fleeting ripples

John Ward Knox: Toward a still life
Tim Melville Gallery (2 Kitchener St)
18 August - 12 September 2009

At Tim Melville’s - just across from Auckland Art Gallery – John Ward Knox presents one drawing and one relief sculpture. Collectively they make up an installation, interacting to create a third artwork out of their spatial and semantic relationship.

The relief sculpture consists of concentric ripples carved into a plaster wall and sanded so they look like sagging flimsy sheeting, held up by a row of five pins. They are raked with soft natural light coming in the window. The framed, mounted drawing is small, about two postage stamps high, and is on an adjacent wall parallel to the footpath.

Ward Knox’s image is created with black biro in such a delicate manner it looks like pencil, and seems to be quoting a scene from a film – possibly French. It shows a woman in a nightie caressing a bare-chested man lying in bed. We can’t see above his shoulders but the scene seems post-coital. Scattered throughout the drawing are dark specks made of gunk from biro-ink residue.

So how can we speculate about John Ward Knox’s choice of image here and how it might connect with biros and rippled sheets? Is the sheet a shroud, a reference to ‘a little death’, to the fleeting nature of desire that moves like winter light across a wall? Should we contemplate the transience of love, ponder over the spent secretions of a ballpoint?

Perhaps the energies underpinning making the drawing parallel carnal desire in its accelerated drive for completion. Maybe the suspended sheet is a veil for the veneer of love, the illusion of permanent happiness – a reference to melancholy.

Whatever the situation, this evocative nuanced exhibition is worth seeing. Its poetic layering stays with you, and has to be experienced firsthand. Images blown up on computer screens (like those above) don’t cut it.

Materials published

Matters
Ed. Sam Rountree Williams
Contributors: Matthew Crookes, John Ward Knox, Sam Rountree Williams, Mythily Meher, Nell May (Cover: Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia)
pp.20, b/w drawings
Newcall, August 2008
$5.00 (from Newcall directly)

Matters 2
Ed. Sam Rountree Williams
Contributors: Jan Bryant, Amy Howden-Chapman, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Clifford, Laura Preston (Cover: Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia)
pp.50, b/w and colour photographs
Newcall, August 2009
$10.00 (from Newcall directly)

These two Newcall publications are out just as a third (edited by John Ward Knox) is about to appear within the Newcall component of the next ARTSPACE show. The first one, a thinner, blue-covered booklet with no photographs, has apparently been out for a while. It is, apart from a Rountree Williams article on a Martyn Reynolds and Marnie Slater performance, mainly writing not linked to specific shows. The short texts are well chosen, all having not only informative content, but also a fluid sensual style – to be read for pure pleasure in itself.

In fact it is a superior publication in terms of writing to the second Matters which is technically more advanced with its coloured illustrations. Over the last two years I have read many texts by most of the first Matters contributors, and Rountree Williams presents them here at their very best. All the writing is pitched perfectly, and can be enjoyed over and over.

In comparison Matters 2 has three stand-out contributions: Andrew Clifford on the convoluted university procedural requirements behind the setting up of Window’s Various Artists exhibition, Amy Howden-Chapman on Fiona Connor, and Sarah Hopkinson on Richard Frater.

Clifford is a great art journalist (and excellent curator) who can effortlessly explain the most complicated art-political scenario in lucid language. Here he has a thorough understanding of the conceptual intricacies underpinning the enforced bureaucratic paperwork and manages to turn the various hoops the curators and artists (particularly Rountree Williams and Holly Willson) had to jump through into quite a gripping and entertaining yarn.

Amy Howden-Chapman on Fiona Connor’s Half The Page exhibition at Gambia Castle is another superb article where she discusses Connor’s research material and how this show of replicas came together, mixed with her own concise observations about newspaper display racks, their duplicates - and one’s thinking habits when encountering them.

Sarah Hopkinson’s article fascinated me because of the way at a certain point in her discussion about Frater’s work she admits some components of his Newcall exhibition So long the difficulties of being single cause misgivings. I admired the honesty of her ambivalence (it is extremely rare for curators to say such things) as she attempted to articulate the complexities and contradictions of her analysis.

The writing by Jan Bryant and Laura Preston I did not admire, simply because – irrespective of content and authorial candour - they should not be writing about shows they organised (or helped organise) themselves: in these cases, Broken Fall (AUT and Newcall) and Vincent Grocery (at Enjoy). It was irresponsible for Rountree Williams to include them, for their participation trivialises Matters and turns it into a public relations rag, much like an Air New Zealand magazine you read on a plane. It was a wrong call. Publications like this should avoid overt flag-waving by self–interested participants, and at least attempt a little objectivity.

Fine (in all senses) sculpture

John Ward Knox: Futures
A Centre For Art, Achilles House
22 October - 8 November 2008

John Ward Knox has exhibited about three or four times in Auckland since his graduation a couple of yeas ago and this exhibition here, in the small ACFA space, is by far his most successful. It indicates an interest in the early seventies work of American artist Richard Tuttle, particularly Tuttle’s minimal wall drawings with wire and pencil, and shaped fabric. (Tuttle is also an influence on Julian Dashper’s recent very understated works).

Ward Knox is interesting in the way he has taken Tuttle’s ideas somewhere else, and those of some of his contemporaries, like Sara Rose. Her folded banner, seen on the floor of the George Fraser and altered by visitor interaction, is related to Ward Knox’s show at Newcall where dirt around a rock on the floor was moved by visitors’ feet.

In this current ACFA show, the main work is a thin square of marble set at an angle within the stained floorboards. It peeks through a square hole cut in a large scrunched up piece of felt that alters as visitors flip and fold it around, changing its contours. The warm ‘friendly’ felt is stitched tightly around the ice cold marble slab - creating a wonderful tension with the fabric’s outer edges - and the latter’s speckled streaky patterns resonate with a LED on the wall showing nothing but ‘snow.’

The other work is a piece of wire that is extended by a length of fine gold chain to straddle one of the room’s corners. It makes a delicate, flattened, horizontal S shape. The two pieces (chain/wire corner and marble/felt floor) make a nice spatial combination in the intimate space. There is also a written text (in my view, irrelevant waffle about music) printed on light card and stacked on the floor. Ward Knox's other sculpture though, is very good indeed, by virtue of its subtlety and shrewd combinations of material. Better than his drawings and videos of the past.

A beautiful thing

Things that you didn’t know you were enjoying: John Ward Knox and Fiona Gillmore
Window, foyer of the Auckland University Library
31 July – 23 August 2008-08-02

Fiona Gillmore and John Ward Knox present here – away from Newcall - a striking combination of stridency and understated subtlety, a complex collaborative display complicated further with auxiliary texts from Knox and Fiona Connor. Connor writes about Gillmore and Knox’s project (‘A willingness to work together is a beautiful thing a willingness to listen is too’), and Knox’s text is a meditation on the title as applied to listening to music.

Gillmore uses thick, dark blue, vertical stripes on a white wall, vaguely like Buren or Dashper, not referencing awning as a metaphor for shelter (as you could suspect) but providing an optical code for a vertical figure walking up the adjacent steps towards the library entrance. There the same blue can be found discreetly on sliding doors, windows and lined shelves. The stroboscopic mural tinkers with the walker’s sideways glance, ensnaring their peripheral vision and synchronizing it with their peripatetic movement. It plays with memory processes while they are in the library and while they are leaving the building, or returning.

Gillmore’s contribution might be visually punchy but Knox’s you can barely see. It consists of a line of very thin necklace chain coming from opposite ends of the glass pane’s bottom edge, meeting in the centre of the floor and held off in mid-air by springy wire. This very clever work implies the chain is around the viewer’s neck and they are being pulled into the exhibit. It creates a hilarious ideational tension where the viewer’s head is being yanked towards the gallery while their feet are being propelled straight ahead up the steps. Very smart work indeed.

Chronological colour separation

Blue as silver as gold: John Ward Knox, Patrick Lundberg, Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia
Newcall Gallery, Auckland
27 May - 14 June 2008

The thread that links the three artworks by these three artists is time, not colour or optical sensation as suggested by the title – though a mystical approach to the three colours might contradict that, even though different wave lengths do take different time periods to travel. The poster for the show by Kate Newby seems very apt.

Time becomes manifest in distinctly separate ways in the three works.

On opening night, John Ward Knox, in a performance, picked up a large rock in one part of the room, carried it over to another area and dropped it onto a pyramid of dark sand. The impact caused the scattering grains to spread out and form a nebula pattern on the floor. Curious visitors will over the duration of the show unknowingly transport the sand further into the remote portions of the room. Two sorts of time are involved: compact opening time; decompressed, unravelling exhibition time.

Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia presents a painting that looks like a copy of a detail from a post-impressionist work. The chronological aspect involves the time for her to learn to paint and create it, the time between the work’s production and the exhibition, and the time it takes for the visitor to identify her source. The artwork is not intrinsically interesting – only a curious foil to Ward Knox and Lundberg whose endeavours are less ordinary.

Patrick Lundberg has been doing some superb painting/wall relief sculpture projects over the past year, particularly in shows at Te Tuhi and St. Paul St. where he cut away ‘frames’ in the thickness of the gallery walls. Understated and innovative, they tested the viewer’s perception to an extreme because at first they looked like delicate drawings. His work at Newcall continues that tradition and also the ambience of the previous show by Fiona Gillmore. Using an extremely fine blue line with a compass he has carefully drawn a set of falling, fat, water drops in a grid formation. You don’t notice them unless you are close to the wall on which they are positioned. When you do, they seem to hover in front of the wall plane. They seem at first to be on a suspended clear sheet. Gradually your eyes adjust and the juicy globules fix themselves to the inner surface of the room.

In the Lundberg work space and time are intertwined. One dimension determines the other in order for the viewer to grasp what is before them. The work is about changing perception and planes, and how when you are too far away, the work disappears. It would be impossible to photograph.

This show is worth calling in on to see. Morning would be better than late afternoon, with the light brighter and more diffuse.

(Poster by Kate Newby)

You are where?

You Are Here: Fiona Connor, Finn Ferrier, Kah Bee Chow, Alex Monteith, John Ward Knox – curated by Ariane Craig-Smith

ARTSPACE, Auckland
2 February - 1 March 2008

I must be confusing it with another street name?... It happens rather often this way, that we believe in things that are quite false: it is enough that some fragment of a memory, come from elsewhere, enters into some coherent pattern open to it, or else that we unconsciously fuse two disparate halves, or still that we reverse the order of the elements in some causal system, to fashion in our minds chimerical objects, having for us all the appearances of reality.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (Djinn)

ARTSPACE’s current curatorial intern, Ariane Craig-Smith has taken an innovative approach to this ‘art mapping’ exhibition, for although it is entitled ‘You are here’ it has very little obviously in common with those city maps that feature that locating phrase, nor has it much in common with the book of that title by Kitty Harmon that deals with images made by artists incorporating maps or alluding to them.

There are no maps at all in this show, save a floor plan of ARTSPACE that shows you where the eleven works are positioned. The exhibition is more about bodily sensations of movement, movement’s traces, those speculative processes that assist us in finding a direction, and certain correlations we use to determine location. The focus is really the thinking behind maps rather than maps themselves, in particular the correlation of the indexical where connections are matched up and parallels found linking the artefact with the outside world. In other words, the nature of those representations that help us move through space and understand it.



The artworks take several approaches. Some record traces of their audience’s movement as they explore the exhibition. Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier have created a raked sand garden at the bottom of the stairs that gallery–goers step into and disturb when they go to examine Fiona Connor’s replica of the ARTSPACE circular noticeboard. Finn Ferrier has also created a fake parquet surface by stencilling a zigzag motif with varnish onto ARTSPACE’s concrete floor. Pehaps this layer will wear out as people walk over it so a path becomes detectable.



Other works, like John Ward Knox’s small biro drawings, are textured rubbings taken off embossed wallpaper. Two of these ‘correlations’ tease the audience because the top halves are identical but their bottom halves differ. They are remote cousins of Fiona Connor’s replicas of an imagined ‘ripped up’ ARTSPACE foyer staircase, mysteriously dumped in the main gallery.





Filmed records of artist movements are seen in John Ward Knox’s video of himself in Aotea Square performing like a ‘dancing bee’ various stepping movements modelled on three small drawings pinned to the wall. Similar are parts of Kah Bee Chow’s video spoof on Irma Vep and The Phantom of the Opera, especially when the catwoman-like protagonist is self consciously moving over the ARTSPACE roof. The viewer thinks of the building they are standing – or sitting – in, the movie referents for the satire, and puzzles over some Photoshopped scenes of Chow’s parents and their garden (see above) which incongruously appear as if transported from another location.




The motion of a racing motorcyclist’s body circumnavigating the Taupo Racetrack is recorded by Alex Monteith in her project that uses cameras facing both forward and backward. The resulting looped projections screened in a corner, cause a particularly physical response from the viewer, especially when the rider leans over while turning into bends. Viewers also have the opportunity to move their own vertical bodies through normally unreachable sections of the main gallery if they use a specially raised, large platform provided by Fiona Connor, Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier. Its height allows the audience to look through temporarily installed clear glass panes in the horizontal windows at the top of the walls, and study Auckland’s urban landscape afresh.

This unique chance to explore the geographical and social meanings behind ARTSPACE’s municipal location is a special self-reflexive opportunity unique to this exhibition, a declaration that subtly announces to the show’s continually changing audience that they are there – these chances are rare - so make the most of it.