Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers tells us about the last show at Newcall

Richard Bryant
Newcall
9 - 24 April 2010

An exhibition of paintings by Richard Bryant is the final show for Newcall Gallery, the Auckland artist-run-space located in Grafton’s Newcall Tower. After a short run of two years the gallery’s collective of artists is disbanding and moving onto other projects.

Although it is sad to see Newcall and its fantastically spacious gallery go, the temporary character of many of Auckland’s artist-run-spaces is not a necessarily a bad thing. Apart from the enduring presence of rm (the K’Rd incarnation of what was most recently called rm103), Newcall is very much part of a legacy of short-term galleries that emerge to meet the particular needs of new groups of artists. From Teststrip in K’ Rd/Vulcan Lane to Special in the Britomart precinct, longevity is not the focus of these collectives so much as providing a hub for a deft mixture of critical thought and collegiality. Just as Newcall’s cohort of artists is moving on, other groups will undoubtedly see the need to develop new exhibition prospects.

It is fitting that Newcall’s swan song exhibition is by Bryant, a founding member of fellow artist-initiative A Centre For Art (ACFA). Bryant’s show presents a highly considered collection of intriguing paintings and paper works. Small in scale with muted hues these works draw attention to the subtle nuances of painted surfaces. The artist takes an unassuming and restrained approach to the material pleasures of liquid brush marks, paper crinkles, fabric weaves and various inky washes. These are quietly compelling paintings that encourage time spent peering at the edge of a canvas or pondering simple material traces.

This understated cleverness is also extended to Bryant’s use of basic collaging techniques. He creates frames or margins within paintings by overlaying different rectangular surfaces. The artist’s exhibition invite offers a curious coupling of presumably found images: a painting of a surreal grandiose space is laid over a somewhat dubious massage instruction chart.

Lest we forget that they are paintings Bryant’s peripheral borders subtly refer to the medium’s more historically loaded concerns. Are we looking at an image within a frame or an image of a frame? The canvas surface of one painting is so thin that the ghostly form of its stretcher shows through the weave. Although Bryant’s works don’t overtly engage with the conceptual ins and outs of contemporary painting (as painters like Simon Ingram or Andrew Barber might) a whisper of a painting discourse is apparent.

What I find most interesting about Bryant’s works is the way they are hung. Although they offer an investigation of similar materials and surfaces these paintings carefully avoid being serialised. The artist does not simply present a series of experiments in painterly delights but a selection of distinctly individual works. Bryant hangs his paintings in careful groupings that refer much more to the visual language of installation than they do to painting traditions. He considers the space between individual works in the same way that an artist like Kate Newby might pay careful attention to the space between different sculptural forms.

In the collegial spirit of artist-run-spaces it seems appropriate to acknowledge the similar practices of other Newcall/ACFA members such as Patrick Lundberg, Anya Henis, Richard Frater or John Ward-Knox. These artists have an affinity for materials and engage with historically hefty formal concerns in fresh and interesting ways. Their artist-initiatives encourage a coalescence of ideas and critical thought alongside a kind of chummy art school camaraderie. These galleries are not only offering alternative exhibition opportunities to those of dealers or institutions, they are also offering an alternative ethos, a space of thought where artists might share and debate similar artistic concerns. It is an unabashedly earnest endeavour, but one that has fruitfully sustained these new art practices beyond their art school beginnings.

Enjoying the light

John Ward Knox: a projection of light
Newcall
6 March - 13 March 2010

Only a week long, this short Newcall show by John Ward Knox involves a minimal installation, a couple of photographs and some potential socialising. The T-shaped gallery is apparently empty - apart from a group of three or four chairs and a box that serves as a table for some biscuits. It anticipates some chat over a nibble and a cuppa, if the visitor is so inclined. This furniture is by the far wall opposite the glass door.

There is no electric light and the large windows by the entrance (facing north) are all uncovered so that daylight ‘projects’ in – direct sunlight or glare reflected off buildings or the sky. Because light cannot bend around corners, the smaller, inner, rectangular space extending to the side of the main gallery is much darker.

This arrangement emphasises the light coming in the window and changing over the passing of the day. This point is emphasised by the artist installing two photos of a cloudless sky, taken two hours apart at Miranda on the Coromandel Peninsula, with the lighter one placed on a light wall, and the much darker one on the darkest wall. Their presence seems to serve as signs to visitors to be mindful of the changing illuminative properties and how they effect the room’s architectural features. It also makes sense considering the artist’s interest in Seurat-like biro drawing and undulating sculptures carved directly into plaster-covered walls.

John Ward Knox seems to offering an immersive phenomenological experience where the role of ‘spectator’ and ‘art object’ breaks down, where the very act of visiting as a participatory element contributes to a total environment. Any conversation had with the Newcall gallery minder or other visitors feeds into this. The three ‘items’ of gallery light, photographs and conversation are more calculated and cohesive than what was at first apparent.

That might be a weakness, for it could be that the relational aspects overstate the obvious and that a quietistic private experience with just the light and space and photographs is sufficient. However we are not living in the seventies: the drinks and food are pragmatic and encourage lingering and return visits. A shrewd strategy.

Newton Marsupial

Marsupial @ Newcall: If only…..
Curated by Hamish Win
Newcall
5 November - 21 November 2009

For Newcall, Christchurch writer, curator and Marsupial entrepreneur Hamish Win has cooked up a nationwide baker’s dozen: Mark Braunias, Nik Geene, Simon Glaister, Robert Hood, Paul Johns, Simon Lawrence, Denise McCulloch, Greg Malcolm, Miranda Parkes, Ashlin Raymond, Malcolm Terry, Telly T’uu and Tao Wells.

While it is a sort of coughed up, lumpy but inconsistent dog’s breakfast, there are good things if you take a long stick and poke around a bit. Some of the artists are poorly represented, like Telly T’uu whose best paintings feature flat shape, not flimsy Mardenesque lines as here, or Simon Glaister, whose poster claims to offer a personal list of rated preferences of other artists in the show (but of course doesn’t dare), or Robert Hood, whose photographs of South Island gas stations on the window are disappointingly ordinary - but others come out well.

Mark Braunias should be prohibited by law from ever handling a paintbrush but he is a genius when it comes to delicate, whimsical, illustrative fantasies, drawn with pens. His forte is graphic imagery for magazines, newspapers and natty little pamphlets, not canvases. What entertains in one looks contrived, ingratiatingly cute and ‘try-hard’ in the other. The tone alters in another context. Here his talent shines within Win’s takeaway, free, wee mag The John Dory Report #19. It’s become a Braunias sketchbook.

Simon Lawrence has a superb wall arrangement of ‘tribal’ versus ‘Catholic’ artefacts – an elegant composition where a selection of ‘primitive’ wooden statuary is positioned alongside chinaware and cards bearing portraits of various Popes. It doesn’t seem to be about any particular sort of god or object of worship, more about two types of western market – non-believing tourists versus committed devotees. A witty anthropological statement.

Paul Johns contributes a portable neon ‘No Smoking’ sign, that’s lying on the floor. Its glowing cigarette is contained within a bright red circle, but without being cancelled by a diagonal red line. It thus mischievously seems to advocate smoking, not prohibit it, despite the wording below the image.

Included amongst a suite of landscape videos by Miranda Parkes is an incongruous film of a flapping white curtain pinioned against a slightly open window. The ripples and billowing forms mesmerise much like the movement of a fire or running brook. It could (and should) be in a room by itself, it is that compelling.

Ashlin Raymond presents a major video work, Ludic Transformation Celebration, that is a send up of the self-realisation industry and the popularity of mystical 'goal actualisation’ programmes – showing herself dressed as an ancient Egyptian priestess. With her accompanying pamphlet it pumps out the slogan Kiss The Future, and amongst the asinine non sequiturs are aphorisms like ‘Kiss the Future is the tiny empire inside your heart.’ Raymond’s project (her image is above) is good company for Lawrence’s look at certain religious and collecting communities, and one of four or five works that make Win’s show worth calling on.

The proof of the pudding

New Artists show: Fresh Gallery Otara, Newcall, None
ARTSPACE
5 September - 10 October 2009

We have here one of those classic scenarios where a show is tortured by internal philosophical conflicts that disrupt pragmatics: an exhibition which normally involves a yearly curation of work from new (hitherto comparatively unknown) artists - selected from a national pool so they can be exposed to a big Auckland audience. However this time, for reasons of hoping to embrace a wider democratic participation so she is not a ‘gatekeeper’ (though if you take on the job, I think it is something you can’t escape) the director/curator has delegated the responsibility to three artist collectives. They do the inviting and are part of a process where the Means is more important than the Ends.

Despite the honourable philosophical intentions, this is not a happy result – for Ends count, and Art and philosophy are not interchangeable. The curator should not have got sidetracked by artist communities and sub-committees. She is paid to make decisions that achieve certain outcomes - like quality shows; not to share power.

Yet although the curatorial deferral achieved by passing the baton to Fresh, Newcall and None hasn’t worked, there are some good things. A few.

First of all Fresh Gallery Otara handle the situation really well. The film Small Axe 09 made by Tanu Gago, Leilani Kake, Visesio Siasau, Serene Tay, and Angela Tiatia is a fascinating series of conversations between Pacific Island and Maori women about the pros and cons of hair straightening, and its relationship with the dominant Eurocentric culture. It is related to some of the projects that some American black artists, like Lorna Simpson for example, have created, but using direct spoken language and music instead of poetic written texts or rarefied, elegant images. The issues raised seem to include freewill, personal taste, self esteem, changing community codes of ‘ethnicity’ perhaps, and new mores for ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ bodies.

Fresh present a united front and have come up with a good product, an excellent ‘Otara’ brand. They save this exhibition from being a total disaster. Newcall in contrast to Fresh seem split by different factions. Their work is fragmented in its content and aspirations. The reading library in the main space is excellent – but those books and magazines were always available in the ARTSPACE office previously anyway, and more of them. Newcall’s idea of splicing a trimmed page of a theoretical text into each shelved book, and then reselecting some such books to be taken to the English collective Form Content in London via hand luggage is inane with its decontextualization. It is a trans-global group grope where the ARTSPACE gallery visitor is forgotten, because the best books disappear.

The theme of democratic process is the content of much of the purple ARTSPACE brochure, particularly in the Newcall section, and this continues with some significant discussions in the publication of Matters 3, now edited by John Ward Knox. However writing and art that awakens enthusiastic reader/viewer interest doesn’t achieve that through bald content alone. It requires layers provided by style, tropes, and poetic inflection - so that audiences are not excited primarily by political rhetoric, guilt, or desire to be pious, but through pleasure – mental or bodily. Information or argument by itself is tedious.

There are certain artists in the Newcall ‘team’ whose work I personally hold in high regard but this ‘democratic’ project turns their conspicuous talent to slush. Everything gets muddied up with incompatible elements made into a sort of thematic cold porridge. Scrape away that conceptual sludge and Clara Chon’s vertical glass slot in the wall, Sunday Minimalist, is witty as a self-portrait (it is like a negative version of Robert Morris’ Box For Standing In), as is Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s semi-autobiographical computer audio-text, A Wire To Fire Into His Heart, with its changing loop structure and vivid language.

None is a studio collective in Dunedin with a space set aside for projects that are implemented when the need arises. Consequently putting a live stream into their gallery when all they can think of is solving storage problems in the basement is like a lot of this show, a waste of time and money. Instead of being paralysed by fears of being perceived as a ‘benevolent auteur’ Emma Bugden should have accepted her salaried role as ‘Prime Mover’ more fully, travelling high and low seeking out under-exposed artists from all over the country (some connected to collectives, some not) and who are in fact ‘new’ – very few here are. A tragically wasted opportunity caused by a failure of nerve.

Lacey sculpture and drawings

Sonya Lacey: In & Outsides
Newcall
10 March - 28 March 2009

This splendidly arranged presentation of Sonya Lacey’s graphite drawings and sculpture shows the architectural qualities of Newcall gallery’s T-shaped floor plan at its very best. Four framed graphite on paper drawings and three sculptures that resonate with each other and the room.

The drawings are superb. They are of clouds or layers of murky mist letting through softly glowing light. Its radiance is controlled by floating smudgy layers and borders that allow shimmering pale banks of exposed sunlight to hover afar. The rubbing of the graphite fits in with Lacey’s work in This Much is Certain in May last year at George Fraser - the burnishing in those drawings and sculpture. Those works though were more abstract and minimal.

Certainly the three sculptures in this show continue that. One is a low ‘bowl’ of thin, spun steel that has been polished by being scoured with sandpaper. Another is a long strip of flexible pine that has been bent so that half lies on the floor while the rest is clamped vertically to the wall through a neat circular hole. The third work is the strangest of them all. It looks like the outer frame of a handleless drawer propped up on the floor. On it are resting what seem to be two ear plugs. These objects are made of compacted blue newspaper dust made by obsessive rubbing of blue skies in photographs. It’s an amazing piece of sculpture.

Lacey’s drawings, being impressively evocative and sensual, will attract quite a following, but her sculpture – despite being more austere – will attract a lot of respect. It reveals a sensibility that is much more unusual in its wit. An exceptionally strong exhibition.