Wild cards

Neil Dawson - Deck: First Cut
Jonathan Smart, Christchurch
May 12 – June 7 2009

In Jonathan Smart’s front gallery Dawson presents two sets of six card replicas: greatly enlarged playing cards of screen printed powder coated paint on stainless steel. Just under knee height they are curved so they can stand upright on the floor. Or, using holes in the corners, they can also be hung on walls. The patterns and designs on both sides are meticulously reproduced from the smaller originals

Actually they are a lot more than just highly ornate, enlarged playing card facsimiles. They have been very cleverly cut so that – in one case - there are three concentric rectangles (plus a circle) bent in alternating concave or convex alignments. For six types of card Dawson has invented six permutations of cut-out and bent formation.

Some are sliced rectangles (frames inside frames); others are circles or diamonds inside rectangles; others still are sets of lines radiating from points. Usually they play with the elaborately intricate ornamentation on the card’s back, delineating some of the dominant motif contours.

With these inventive works, Dawson takes something terribly commonplace and makes it extraordinarily interesting. All of a sudden you want to examine playing cards and their Arts and Crafts designs. You start to wonder about their history.

As an installation Deck: First Cut works well. A room full of these works on only the walls would look tediously regular - for as relief sculpture you don’t want to see too many in succession. However on the floor as part of a ‘pack’, a large number (i.e. over three) seem more unpredictable. Looking down on the curved planar edges helps enormously. It is also interesting looking through the holes at what the curved stainless steel reveals of its own form.

Placed this way with one on the wall and eleven on the floor, they look better than they would suspended in mid air on invisible wires, a possibility which Dawson might have considered. They seem like a herd of animals, originally two by two as in Noah’s Ark but now intermingling. An excellent sculpture show.

Substance and light

Neil Dawson at Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. 27 November -22 December 2007

It is easy to see why Neil Dawson is exhibiting his latest set of wall works in the front room at Jonathan Smart’s, the space with the big window overlooking High Street. The light is so intense there, especially in summertime, and it brightens noticeably as the day progresses. The work changes accordingly. It becomes more evanescent and shimmering, more holistic and less composed. Figures merge into ground. The metallic green and grey colours in particular become even more iridescent.

Dawson has six works on display: five on walls, one hanging suspended from the ceiling. The hanging work (Pointer) is a spray-painted, double cone that turns horizontally like a swivelling compass needle. The two halves are coloured grey and red while the opposing cones are made of a curved steel mesh with patterns of flying darts that diminish in size as they approach the two tips.

Two other cones (Vanishing Points) are on the walls, pointing to the floor. One pattern is of crevasses, the other of vertical crosses. The two motifs are linked with the two cones being side by side. Dawson has a black wit.

While the cone works are great, the rest of the show is made of three arcs (Sweeps) that hang on the walls. I like these even more. Curved with the centres projecting out, they look like sweeping brushmarks sliding across the wall. One is patterned with inverted darts among scudding clouds, another is with just clouds, and the third with I-beams suspended in the cumulus. They have a lightness of touch the cones lack, partially because of their interaction with the walls, the way they cling to the vertical planes of the architecture. There is a nice teasing of the volumetric, a nuanced agitation of the space that accompanies the eddies turning the double-cone and the shifting light coming in the window.

By the way, the images I have pasted here are not from the Smart show, but very similar.