Here is a contribution from Rhondda Bosworth about a New Gallery show.

In Shifting Light
Curated by Ron Brownson
New Gallery
8 October 2008 - 12 April 2009

This stimulating show, using mostly paintings from the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery, explores the concept of landscape as both external and internal. The show’s curator, Ron Brownson asserts “. . . the differences between interior and exterior space affect what we contemplate as landscape.” This curatorial concept is useful because of its potential for inclusiveness. Almost any artwork can be described as a “landscape” in these terms. In Shifting Light gives us an opportunity to see some fine works.

I enjoyed the room containing paintings by Charles Goldie, Petrus van der Velden, James Nairn and Raymond McIntyre. These vintage works, of landscapes in the orthodox sense, were all wonderful paintings that grabbed my attention. My favorites were Charles Goldie’s The story of the Arawa canoe (c 1938) a tiny painting of great beauty executed on a cigar-box lid, Van der velden’s sublime Stormcloud (1907-09) and Raymond McIntyre’s stunning Evening (1905). I have to mention too, the rivetting colour of James Nairn’s Sunset (1903).

McCahon is represented of course, in top form, demonstrating a spirituality that I hope we never take for granted. His iconic works Takaka Night and Day (1948) and A Candle in a dark Room (1947) are most familiar to me as postcards. The latter is simple and modest in form, yet it effortlessly accesses the spiritual self. I couldn’t help comparing its success with Peter Robinson’s visually breathtaking Strategic Plan (1998). Meticulously executed in red, black and white, with a distinctly Maori feel, this large painting could have been so wonderful, but its texts (I could only understand the ones in English), a banal and cynical critique of the chattering classes and the art world, bring this viewer down with a disappointed clunk.

There was a good photography room with works by Daley, Oettli, Morrison, Baigent and Westra, but they are all dwarfed by the power of Ava Seymour’s photo-collages. I must confess there was a time when I couldn’t come to grips with Seymour’s work, but this time they got me round the throat and gave me a good shaking. The works were selected from her series Health, Happiness and Housing (1997) in which beautiful photographs of pastel-coloured state houses are juxtaposed with inhabitants in the grip of horribly visible dementia. Her diptych Exotica (2004) which depicts a sleazy corner of K’ Rd, is a surreal, psychological tour de force.

Other works I appreciated were John Hurrell’s elegantly cryptic Conan’s Head (1989) a large painting in which fragments of maps create an electric psychological energy, and Bill Hammond’s Buller’s Tablecloth (1947) – brilliant, tantalizing, disturbing. I am usually unresponsive to video works, but Mladen Bizumic’s Hauturu doc (with soundtrack Adagio – Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones) 2003blew me away. A lyrically beautiful work of shifting fabric-like forms that create a land/sea scape, accompanied by achingly sad music, it went straight to the heart.

(Above, images by Seymour, McCahon and Bizumic.)

Scratch 'n Sniff

Summer Show
John Leech, Auckland
12 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

It is always worthwhile having a good nose around in places that deal a lot in secondary sales like John Leech - or the various auction houses that have pre-auction exhibitions to draw in potential bidders. You often discover early work by artists you like that has not been shown in major municipal institutions or the artist’s local dealer gallery. Sometimes you find examples that are unusual, that differ in some way from their accepted style, or are hybrid images between styles.

There are lots of works here I really like: the wild brusherly Mrkusich; the cool, lacquered black-blues of Hotere; the bizarre McWhannell car; the early folk-arty Stevenson.(see above)

But two works in this show I’m really wild about. They utterly intrigue me.

First of all there is this little Terry Stringer. He is an artist I don’t generally admire, for I find his bronze mock-cubist/deco figures and faces a bit stuffy and formuliac. However his image of a hand plucking the head off a small figure really surprised me. It is mesmerising in the intensity of its violence: like something from Goya. It is very funny, witty and terrifying on several levels. The vanity of the body language of the headless figure is very entertaining. It looks like a soccer player about to kick off - to begin a match in a crowded stadium – but the ball under his left foot could also be a head, another one perhaps. And the proportions of the armless figure look very contemporary. With his short legs and long torso the scene looks comical, with the body slightly twisted as if posing for a photograph.


The other work is a McCahon painting of a Northland landscape. To me it is quite suggestive. It seems very sexual and not about landscape at all. The lower half seems to be a woman’s crotch with her pubis and thighs. Above them hovers the head of a penis and a cloud of spurted ejaculate.

Okay I do wonder if my twisted imagination here is playing tricks on me. Maybe I’m just oversexed and need a cold shower. But maybe also an artist like McCahon could create images he didn’t fully understand himself.

On the other hand, maybe he did? We can’t assume he had no sense of humour or mischievous perversity. It is very likely he was interested in the primal, and that he viewed carnal desires as a legitimate layering he could mix with landscape forms and the eroticism of rounded geological formations. I think it was intended. Dirty Colin. How wonderful.