Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, Manukau City
17 November 2007 -10 February 2008
This ‘new painting’ exhibition is toured by Porirua’s Pataka gallery, and curated by Pataka’s Senior Contemporary Art Curator Helen Kedgley. She has picked Darryn George, Sara Hughes, Andrew McLeod, Kelcy Taratoa and Tim Thatcher so with such disparate styles it is quite idiosyncratic. Plus much of it is traditional oil painting. No Andre Hemer (repeatable pseudo gestures), Simon Ingram (robot painting) or Leigh Martin (digital painting machine) here. But there are some nice surprises.
In New Zealand the pioneering work mixing painting with digital technology was done by Richard Killeen in his investigations of the properties of language, especially the paintings made in 1986-7. Over twenty years later such digital methods have become commonplace, and Killeen’s influence very apparent.
With Kedgley’s selection, the obvious choices are McLeod and Hughes.
I’m not sure about the significance of the others though. In some, digital technology is not absolutely essential to their image making process, as say the methods of Andre Hemer or Julia Morison might be. And from looking at the catalogue, the reduced touring version here does not seem as successful as the original Pataka hang. While Sara Hughes only has one painting, Tim Thatcher has five, yet a lot of wall space in the outer corridor is unused. Because there is no even distribution of work for all five artists, the show seems slightly ad hoc.
Kedgley doesn’t fully show how painting can be more flexible or more adventuresome with digital technology. Even though her selection is limited, her quirky tastes can provide pleasant surprises. For example, I’d never seen Tim Thatcher’s work before, but I enjoyed his paintings of tree parts. They are sumptuous oil renditions of Andy Goldsworthy-style sculptures, but scrawnier and weedier – perhaps as envisaged by a comic artist like Chester Brown. They have an appealing stoned nuttiness about them, and seem to be a sort of tongue-in–cheek meditation on a woman (‘The Log lady’) in David Lynch’s TV series ‘Twin Peaks” who is always cradling a log: a satire on ‘tree-hugging.’
Despite my enthusiasm for Thatcher’s oils, I’m not convinced he should be here. Simply because he uses Google to download tree images is hardly a valid reason to put him in a ‘digital‘ show, and in fact his (and McLeod’s) traditional painterly sensibility show Kedgley’s thematic premise to be a bizarre oxymoron. Why the hang up on paint? A print or photography show would have enabled a far more focussed examination of digital technology. Yet Kedgley stays true to her passion for old style painting: she prefers Andrew McLeod’s sensual painting over his more innovative (Guillermo Kuitca influenced) prints. Really she is using artists’ digital interests as an excuse for a painting show. That is her priority, not the other way round.
For example Kedgley’s choice of Darryn George’s work includes roughly made, less pristine examples. His ‘The Equaliser’ - five alternating red/black pairs of repeated size and motif - looks terrific on one wall by itself, but this Māori synthesis of Walters/McLaughlin formalism with Lasker tactility has a surprising casual rawness close up. George is uncharacteristically sloppy.
Yet to be fair, Kedgley hasn’t deliberately ignored painting with a fastidious industrial finish – it is just that in Te Tuhi it happens to be downplayed. Sara Hughes’ dazzling synthesis of Stella, Anuszkiewicz and Held is hard to ignore, and the suite of Walholesque Kelcy Taratoa paintings fits into Kedgley’s theme well. His work though, despite its appropriate method, is tiresomely similar to a lot of Pop art in this country – like Rudolf Boulee for example – and is not distinctive. His fixation on war comics, action heroes and media manipulation is too heavy handed and didactic to be significant.
This show tries to be both painting and digital but doesn’t embrace either satisfactorily. Maybe the entire original exhibition has to be seen for the argument to work; perhaps it could have gained from a more detailed examination of the technology particular to each artist; but I think Kedgley’s choice of artists is the problem. Too few of the artists really tackle the implications of the theme full on – they are too busy being painters. The grouping doesn’t convince.
