Locked-down black; floating white

Jonathan Jones
Tim Melville
10 March - 10 April 2010

Jonathan Jones, an Aboriginal artist (Kamilaroi / Wiradjuri) who works in light with bulbs and neon tubes in a manner vaguely related to Bill Culbert (to set a New Zealand context), has exhibited in Auckland before. He was in Good Company Flash Lights - curated by Jim Vivieaere - which a few years ago came to Bath Street.

Jones currently presents at Tim Melville’s a suite of geometric, linear, graphite (pencil) drawings and a wall installation of glowing neon tubes arranged in a pattern of repeated diamonds.

The neon formation alludes to carved patterns on weapons and trees, painted body decorations, or configurations put on the inside of possum-skin coats. You could read these as stacked up spread-eagled (or star-jumping) figures. However if you wish to ignore such symbolic narrative, even on a formal level Jones is extremely inventive. His diamonds are rendered in single, double or triple parallel lines to create odd lopsided tensions and a curious asymmetric geometry. Just when diagonal, horizontal or vertical rhythms start to become a pulse, they abruptly tease by switching to a new sort of line that is attractively irregular.

The austere drawings of black angular and straight lines seem to reference Mondrian and van Doesberg. Apparently however they are based on desiccated riverbeds Jones has seen in India that sparkle with incrustations of dried salt. Like the neon work they subvert repetition with an odd wonky tension that dissipates at the paper edges.

Jones’s tightly executed drawings remind me of the time-based (and encoded) painted works on paper by Simon Morris, but Jones seems not interested in systems or transparent process. His images vary in their use of space: some deep, others flat and schematic; some with skimpy cursory description, others apparently fully resolved. Their peculiar inconsistency comes from their source as found lines seen from the air.

These drawings are all beautifully made but viewer preferences will inevitably be subjective, a form of free association. It’s an interesting show with the precise sharp black edges providing a vivid contrast to the blurry glare of the bright white tubes. Two opposite senses of spatial location – dark and crisp (but locked down) with light and soft (but floating) - placed side by side. A delicately understated political metaphor.

Twenty-three in the Bath

Group Show: December exhibition
Bath St
2 December - 20 December 2008

Christmas stock shows, whilst they can be irritatingly trivial if the works seem like dinky trinkets, are also a good way to surveying a gallery proprietor’s taste. They give you a chance to see if there is a pattern or consistency. What makes them tick? What aesthetically or conceptually pushes their buttons? They might even avoid consistency.

This Bath St show is spread out on the walls of the large L-shaped room so the twenty-three artists don’t get in each other’s way. Even small sculpture is on the walls.

A cursory glance indicates that there are some formal and stylistic groupings that link some of the artists and works together. Circular wheel forms – for example - are found in Louise Purvis and Robert Jahnke works. In painting also, overlapping and undulating net forms are seen in Katie Thomas and Kathryn Stevens. Or pressuring shape with contour-edge or line in Leon van den Eijkel and James Ross.

If I could scurry into the gallery in the dead of night with a suitcase and help myself, the works I’d pinch would be the gorgeous Denys Watkins’ Indian works on paper and Katie Thomas’ two fascinating ‘net’ paintings. And I’d probably risk a hernia by also grabbing Bob Jahnke’s wonderful 'crayfish pot' made of corten steel.

I’d be tempted by the several mesmerising drawing/photographic hybrids in this show: works of ink on photographs by James Robinson (for him subdued and restrained); a photochemical drawing by Grant Beran; and surrealist photographs by Tanja Nola.

There is plenty to think about here. Peter Gibson Smith’s shaped panels use intersecting planes in a manner related to the drawings of Georgie Hill (at Ivan Anthony), but with a delicate scrubbed coloration that avoids intensity, using modelled forms, not negative shapes.

There are also Anna Eggert’s intriguing sets of common objects covered by wound-on data cable. The effect of repeated tiny horizontal lines creates shifting moirelike patterns, unpredictable rhythms and curious optical blendings.

Eggert is an Australian artist, as is Jonathan Jones, previously shown here in the Jim Vivieaere curated exhibition Good Company Flash Lights. He now presents shelves holding wiping sponges. On these he has placed aboriginal motifs that look like bark painting patterns, and which also seem connected to Jasper Johns’ famous ‘flagstone’ paintings. The sponge serves perhaps as a clever post-colonial metaphor, the wiping away of one culture maybe to superimpose another.

This is a good exhibition to leisurely ponder over. It has an enjoyable diversity.

Descending from top to bottom, images are of works by Katie Thomas, Robert Jahnke, James Robinson, Tanja Nola, Peter Gibson Smith, Anna Eggert and Jonathan Jones.