Language matters

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Two Rooms
11 September - 10 October 2009

Six artists from Australia and New Zealand present a varied language-fixated show in the large downstairs Two Rooms space, demonstrating a wide range of approaches and materials for text manipulation.

Anne Noble’s photograph of her daughter’s Ruby’s imaginative spell for attaining invisible flight are a big surprise and a good laugh: a recipe that could almost come out of Macbeth, carefully written out in pencil in a school notebook. The work looks a little like a Marie Shannon, but less sweet and longer, written on several open pages. As a document it seems authentically private as a genuine fantasy, not constructed to be documented.

The two white neon works from Mary-Louise Browne are gorgeous looking with their snappily elegant letter shapes, and clever references to Alexander Pope (just nine short words make up one long line) or popular parlance (three short words), but their self referentiality makes them cling to the media of Kosuth and the syntactical structures of Weiner. Browne’s method of technical presentation here is unwisely derivative, the sixties conceptualist art historical connotations blocking off access to her genuinely witty content.Perhaps she should have left the original Pope quote (and ten low words oft creep in one dull line) intact?

Rose Nolan’s wall paintings (like those recently seen at Te Tuhi) are a lot better than her two free-hanging Hessian banners shown here, dense with oval perforations through which you apply the language. Their mangy reverse sides make you wish they were on a wall, and the declared sentiments of Less Is More or (the opposite) Less Is Over Rated are hardly earth-shattering - despite the humour of the 'subtracting' holes. Nolan is not in form with these clumsy red and white hangings that double as conceptual filters.

Nolan is Australian, as is Mikala Dwyer who presents a long, blue, river-like carpet that spills down the wall and across the floor. It features phrases in coloured felt letters naming parts of the moon, features discovered by Giovanni Batista Riccoli in the seventeenth century. This list has a poetical flavour not necessarily accentuated by the rolled-out carpet format. Dwyer is famous for her formidable powers of invention with ‘non-art’ materials but here her contribution seems decidedly ordinary.

The exhibition’s highlights are three drawings by English artist Fiona Banner, framed drawings of (or studies for) larger wall texts. They come from Banner intially describing the actions of a stripper she hired so she could verbally describe her. Earlier she had also treated a sexually explicit movie as a source for ‘life model’ descriptions. Her studio writing - made in live peformances - is in short staccato-like phrases, bursts of disconnected factually described body parts, strung out in a ribbon of pencilled language. A bit like Robbe-Grillet in its clinical precision.

One Banner drawing has the written planes make up a corner, the others are frontal spatially - one like a tall heap (an allusion to Smithson?), the other a low rectangle laid over another painted over, much fainter, written oblong. The text is printed, not cursive, and quite scratchy and raw.

Denis O’Connor presents a series of slate Chinese inkwells bearing relief-carved images based on literary texts that he loves. These small paperback-sized, framed annotations are visual footnotes that for him are quite small, and simpler than usual. The intimacy works, drawing you in close, plus there is an added sensual bonus of muted, wax-coated colour which has an extraordinary softness.

Banner and O’Connor are worlds apart, but they (and Noble) make this group exhibition a good visit.

UNITEC show

Kirstin Carlin, Michael Harrison: Destination
Snowwhite, Unitec School of Design
20 October - 14 November 2008

In the two narrow rooms of Snowwhite gallery are eight Michael Harrison acrylic-on-paper works, and six oil paintings by Kirstin Carlin; alternating in small groups. They are an odd couple, Harrison and Carlin, brought together by Snowwhite’s curator Mary-Louise Browne: his delicately precise edges and gently mottled surfaces acting as a foil for her ragged contours and under-painted, broadly-brushed streaks.

Harrison is the more accomplished artist by far, judging his intimate scale carefully in relation to the carefully aligned, meticulously positioned shapes that he constructs with considerable finesse. With Carlin, the small vistas she creates are often crammed, having no tension with the edges of their modest stretchers. Her symmetrical landscapes are underworked with their thin sweeping strokes, though one asymmetrical image of woods around a lake is better because of its isolated, vibrant squiggles for trees. Of her selection, her paintings of castles work best due to her weaving together of perpendicularly opposed brush strokes. They have a sense of controlled construction that her blander landscapes lack.

Where symmetry fails for Carlin it succeeds for Harrison. Because brushstrokes are not his subject-matter, he can pull his audience in close and not need to make largish works. He concentrates on perfecting nuances of shape so that birds in the sky become logos - like out of a Batman movie – as if positioned in front of the moon.
Harrison creates psychological drama in the tradition of the Siennese painter Sassetta, with divine signs in the sky, but using a modernist simplicity.