Negotiating institutional space

Infinite Leave to Remain: Richard Frater, Patrick Lundberg, Susie Thomas
St. Paul St Gallery - foyer and outer streetfront window
21 January - 12 February 2010

In this unusually located exhibition utilising ‘dead’ viewing space around and about (and not properly within) St. Paul St Gallery, three artists cleverly explore the theme of control of visual material, the space itself, and ideational ownership. With the huge Gallery One empty, they use its street frontage as a saluting ‘tip of the hat’ to the Window gallery at the Auckland University library, a couple of blocks downtown.

Thomas’s two lightboxes in the foyer next to Gallery Two are legally binding licensing agreements between herself and the institution exhibiting the work, where the material under discussion is the genetic information (DNA data) in two strands of her hair. The contract is elucidated in detail with graphs at the top of the two glowing squares. These drawn images are not identical, and the sequencing of the upper letter groupings also varies, as does the spacing below of the horizontal measuring digits. The work seems a comment on image ownership, deliberately paralleling copyright stipulations where the artist/creator (Licensor) has control of the reproduced image, not the owner or exhibiter (Licensee).

In the window of Gallery One Richard Frater has a creased, unfolded, white sheet pinned by its top corners to the back wall of the shallow space. In front of it he also has a life-size greyish blue photograph of another sheet printed onto a third sheet, attached by magnets to the front glass. The two hanging rectangles sag in their middles, causing baggy wrinkles at their bottom edges that catch the natural light bouncing in off the street. The imposed photographed sheet seen through the thick glass looks wet and sticky, with trapped v-shaped air bubbles bulging under the thin cotton. Inevitably the tonally dramatic front image tends to obscure the much subtler, more delicate piece of fabric behind it that almost dissolves in the reflected glare.

Patrick Lundberg has a pencil drawing on the back wall, presenting eight lead lines (replicable on tracing paper) that look like part of some dotted or continuous cursive script. These slightly ornate (slightly Celtic) glyphs can be interpreted in a number of ways. They can be indexical references to planar borders within the space. On occasion they can be vectors pointing at some quality nearby for directional emphasis. They also can be staked-out declarations that occupy parts of the space, like flags, graffiti or pegs – saying ‘Lundberg was here.’ They even interact with Frater’s loose white sheet, mimicking its lower edge, or going behind the fabric so the line becomes hidden.

This is a shrewd show because the three artists have more in common than you might suppose. The negotiation stated by Thomas is also alluded to in the front window by the two others using that space. Just as her lightboxes have a conversation together as well as with the institution, there is an amusing dialogue between the works of Frater and Lundberg about control of the narrow site and its dominant versus submissive options. This is highlighted by the need for viewer accessibility through the gallery interior as a supplementary countering alternative to only peering through the front glass.

On Adam's walls

Wall Works
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
8 September – 4 October 2009

The notion of drawing or painting directly onto the gallery wall has been with us for at least forty years now, probably becoming most well known with the practice of Sol Lewitt. For this method, Tina Barton has picked an unusual group of artists to work on the Adam Art Gallery walls, eight individuals some of which you and I would be unlikely to predict: David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison, Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, and Jeena Shin.

For the first half of the show the gallery was opened so that the visiting public could observe the artists constructing their artworks. If you click on the link here you can examine nineteen slides showing samples of the processes involved. (Put your cursor on one image and lefthand click halfway down the righthand edge to change it).

Barton has come up with a terrifically inventive eight-unit combination. The big surprises are Cauchi to install graffiti in the two toilets, Paterson to screen a DVD loop in the dark walled, rubber-floored ‘dungeon’, and Harrison to paint on a large moveable wall by the entrance. Inspired choices.

David Cauchi’s contribution is a revelation – far funnier and classier than what you’d pick up from his blogsite. His use of the orange and green planar surfaces of the Ladies and Gents on which to place withering (often appropriated) comments on idealism, art world participants, liberal democracy and our meaningless lives in general make him a sort of Aztec-obsessed Keith Haring–meets-Emil Cioran, and are so entertaining (though he’s serious in his unrelenting scorn of anything and everything, not trying to get laughs) that his incessant but earnest quips could turn you into a compulsive dunny loiterer.

Reuben Paterson’s black and white film on a pearlescent glittery screen celebrates a queer politic in its furtive, bunkerlike space and bombarding central-state imagery. The flashing, pulsing sequences of kaleidoscopic patterns expand and contract, spin and tilt; hurling you through the screen at unexpected speeds - via different jarring scales - to explore delicate geometric snowflakes and dotty asymmetrical Brownian motion. It is difficult to leave the space because you keep discovering new shapes and tumbling axial alignments you had never previously noticed.

The tunnelling physicality of Paterson’s project has similarities with Kim Pieters’ towering and shimmering wall paintings of cascading pale blue and creamy dribbles on the staircase. These gorgeous surfaces evoke the Sublime and force your eye to rush to the ceiling and its corners, seeking out strategically positioned, negatively-shaped drip-free zones that allow planar respite.

Similarly vertical linear qualities, but much finer and graphic – not overtly painted - are also apparent in Julia Morison’s multi-panelled Myriorama mural that descends down the wall under the Adam’s infamous Athfield-designed floor/ceiling slot. Her columns of 106 portable and reusable panels, each with a gently mottled background overlayed with one of thirty-two repeatable permutations of entangled or parallel lines, drop down or traverse three linked walls, and play off against two thick black parallel bands that bisect the high planes.

Simon Morris and Jeena Shin use only one wall each. With Morris’ looping grid of pale yellow ochre lines you can see where the tone and saturation levels vary, and how – using templates not pencil – the artist has gradually built up the horizontal structure. You can also see how in the first half he has added extra lines, doubling back in reverse to create a denser complexity. The occasional ball within the transparent trajectories indicates where the tips of adjacent lines have overlapped, providing clues to where certain sections of pathway have shared common routes.

Jeena Shin’s large mural features tumbling tangram-like forms of overlapping rectangles and triangles in glossy grey on a matt white plane. The occasional fine ridge shows traces of her process as she modifies the angular geometric rhythms and descending negative gaps. The evanescent forms are getting larger for this artist, becoming more robust, more strident and less delicate.

Michael Harrison’s work on a movable rectangular wall is a comparatively simple composition that shows a small red cat suspended within the larger negative silhouette of an open-mouthed Alsatian where the curved arabesqued contours of the feline tail and canine jaws play off amusingly against each other. It is fascinating to see Harrison deal with this uncharacteristic scale and successfully resolve any formal or technical problems.

Patrick Lundberg’s project involves thinking about the site specific peculiarities of the wall fittings and architectural fittings around the top of the stairs, using a repertoire of generic pencil lines (repeatable with tracing paper) similar to those used by Sol Lewitt. You have to look closely to see them and how Lundberg refers to various wall edges, ceiling planes, bookcase corners, light fittings and banisters.

This show looks excellent now, but I saw it last weekend at the time of the Adam’s Tenth Anniversary Party. For that event Barton had commissioned temporary structures designed and built by second year students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design to be placed inside or next to the installations by the eight artists I’ve just discussed. The result was a political, aesthetic and conceptual disaster, making many of the artists furious that their projects were interfered with at a time when many out-of–town visitors had come to see the show. It was sad to see such curatorial blundering - though thankfully, only short-term.

OK a KO

OK (Hany Armanious, The Estate of L. Budd, Julian Dashper, Richard Frater, Patrick Lundberg, Campbell Patterson)
Curated by Sarah Hopkinson
Michael Lett
27 May - 4 July 2009

The six works from six artists that make up this exhibition - assembled by Sarah Hopkinson - all tend to be understated visually (lots of white), but with plenty going on conceptually. The theme seems to be a vague examination of essences and how we codify phenomena such as ‘identity’.

The voices quoted in the work from The Estate of L. Budd set the stage. Written on a painted wallpaper sheet with a dilapidated hifi speaker sitting on some battered scales on the floor, the quotes deny their own corporeal origins, and initial sense too. Signifier and signified get swapped around, entity and idea, subject and object get reversed so that part of the scrawled text reads: …by the objective reality of an idea I understand the entity or being of the thing represented by the idea, in so far as this entity is in the idea…

Meaning turns to sludge, certainties disappear. Entities transmute into ideas, expand and spread.

OK’s other artworks parallel this slippery amorphousness. Richard Frater has a video of walls made of sugar cubes slowly dissolving in a tank of agitated water, Campbell Patterson has a low square landscape of small undulating hillocks made of Persil washing powder, so that the smell dominates the room far beyond its source. The perfumed soap particles seem to be spreading out into K’ Rd.

The theme continues. Hany Armanious has a portrait made of cut locks of hair spread thinly on a page so we can see a face. Some parts of a visage also hover above it. It’s spreading like Persil aroma. There is an uncertainty factor built in here, for how much is coincidence, how much calculation?

A very unusual Julian Dashper work features a cluster of half inflated balloons pinned by their mouths to the wall, with the artist’s photograph glued on one. As their air gradually seeps out, there is a sense of isolated selves living their transient existences - their lives ebb away and their bodies shrivel. Dashper’s artist’s breath, referencing Piero Manzoni’s balloons, mixes with Patterson’s soap molecules to be then carried in the draughts circulating within the gallery.

Even a gallery wall cannot claim permanence or stasis. Patrick Lundberg’s portable section of plaster gib shows how a precise archaeological excavation might reveal a history of wall paint application. He exposes myths of wall insusceptibility to change; he showcases their illusory solidity. Like soap powder that moves to a far corner as olfactory particles, or the tumbling snipped hairs of a portrait, or dissolving sugar bricks, or breath from a balloon, or entities that once represented ideas (but now reversed) - layers get scraped away and discarded as dust, to be picked up and redeposited by passing zephyrs.

This is fascinating show shouldn’t be missed.

Crockford on K' Rd

Patrick Lundberg
Sue Crockford Gallery Project Space
Dec – Jan holidays

This window display by Patrick Lundberg, the recent winner of the TWNCAA in Hamilton, takes his interest in subtraction as a method of historical analysis (when applied to gallery wall surfaces) and transmutes the frame motif he has used previously into a Peter Halley-like cell or circuit. Here the space it is in is a crucial component (though not in a site-specific sense). It is the window by the entrance to the old Teststrip space on K’ Rd - now Gambia Castle. It has been for some months a little annex for Sue Crockford and this is its fifth or sixth show.

In this glass ‘tank’ Lundberg uses the worn doors of a small cupboard. It looks like a fusebox, and that reference makes it reflexive, alluding to the hermeticism of the art world as an isolated cell. On the doors is a vertical lozenge and a smaller wheel form, and together the two seem to allude to Crockford’s downtown gallery and this street frontage. Other meanings could be different art world circuits that are separate communities.

Lundberg’s cleverness is that there is more than morphology involved. The image’s significance goes beyond shape, for there is a chronological element where historical traces are implied through scraped away paint. Change is built in as Lundberg exposes where old layers have been covered over by new ones.

This window gallery is a shrewd tactic by Crockford to catch the eye of those traipsing Auckland’s ‘art mile’ along K’ Rd. A good way of luring prospective clients from the top down to the bottom of Queen Street.

Part of a show

Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award 2008
Curated and judged by Natasha Conland
Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
22 August -20 November 2008

It is the strangest of exhibitions this time round. In fact it is an anti-intelligence, anti-contemporary art exhibition. (As shrewd observers have always known.) Truly dumb - despite the indisputable erudition of its judge. Three of the thirty-three finalists are not even on display, and the artists’ statements are not in the hardcopy catalogue nor in the online one. They are the very thing you should be reading at home to whet your appetite for a visit.

The museum pretends it wants contemporary art lovers to flock to it, but by making the artists rent all the necessary gear for their projects themselves, it sends out the message it really only wants hangable canvases - only a narrow cross-section of contemporary art practice.

Think about the winner, the brilliant Patrick Lundberg. He normally makes site-specific works examining the exhibition history of institution walls by cutting away and removing paint, leaving a subtractive frame. The work can’t be transferred. Its meaning is particular to the physical placement and political history of the physical plane it is cut out of. So he won with a portable compromise. Great for him as fiscal encouragement, but the entered work doesn’t do him justice. (Like Ann Shelton two years ago, when you felt it was really unentered works that got her the prize.)

I think the overall quality is better than last year, but it is similar to what Leonhard Emmerling created with very little installation or moving image. So despite Conland being rigorous, oddly it has fallen flat, seeming slightly gormless and anal. But like last year, it’s very tastefully presented. But as good taste is the arch–enemy of art the pervading decorum screws the event up. It needs a lot more mayhem and vulgarity.

My six personal favourites were from Fiona Amundsen, Keila Martin, Marcus Williams & Susan Jowsey, Richard Maloy, Sam Rountree Williams and Tony Nicolls. Their works had nice muscular scale matched with intriguing ideas.

If you are passing through Hamilton on your way somewhere else, pop in and check this out, but don’t make a special pilgrimage.

(Above, unexhibited but picked works by ck reynolds, Dorothy Helyer and Emily Lane.)

Peter Dornauf, our Hamilton correspondent, sends us this review of TWNCAA

Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award 2008
Curated and judged by Natasha Conland
Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
23 August - 30 November 2008

Art competitions seem a little outdated these days. Is one art piece, in such a context, really fifteen thousand dollars better than all the rest? Of course not. But that’s the circus one buys into, the premise on which the whole silly thing is constructed; show biz; oooh, ah, a winner, gold medal, glitz, gaga, brouhaha.

Then there’s the judging. I always want to see the works that have been rejected. Maybe we should resurrect the Salon de Refuse.

Anyhow, the Waikato Art Award threw up its ubiquitous “controversial” winner. We’ve had soap holders, DB crates and now a piece of plaster board indented with squared lines. It’s become almost de rigour for such a selection, becoming a little tiresome and predictable.

But that wasn’t the funniest thing going on here. The real crack-up was reading the artists’ statements, watching them strain and puff their way to some kind of bullfrog profundity. The prize for the most inflated piece of verbal gymnastics must go to Marcus Williams and Susan Jowsey for the explanation accompanying their video work, The Limbic. Here’s a sample:

The uniquely mammalian occurrence of individual endocrine regulation through the interdependence of the group.

Worth 9.75 on the horizontal bars.

Most of the time the works collapsed under the weight of such pomposity.

Speaking of the comic, it was amusing to follow the bureaucratic footwork of a nervous director attempting to appease City Councillors and “patrons” perceived negative reactions to the show with pre-emptive quotations from their own latest strategic document. It apparently “challenges us to be ‘bold and imaginative". Whether such a ploy, obviously felt necessary, is enough to dampen the “sense of unease” as Kate Vusoniwailala anxiously and politically puts it, remains to be seen. It’s obvious which patrons the director feels she needs to pitch her message to, given the shift to the doctrine of populism in recent years at this institution.

Having said all that, there were some standout works of the thirty three selected.

Miranda Parkes, Hourglass. Her work always delights. There is that wonderful contradiction between voluptuous, sculptural form and strict geometry of bright paint. A visual feast.

Clay Heads, by Richard Maloy was a stunner. Echoes of Munch’s Scream together with the mud men of Max Ernst and some African tribe. Primal and cleverly executed.

Censored, by Bruce Connew showed us how political art can be done well. Young Sun Han’s Untitled (collaged appropriated image) was simply arresting and Paused Painting by Helen Calder skilfully reminded us of the viscous qualities of paint itself.

(The above image shows the winning work by Patrick Lundberg.)

Woeful space for woeful paintings

Jokes With Strangers: Denys Watkins, Roman Mitch, Garth Steeper, Milli Jannides, Sam Rountree Williams
Curated by Sam Rountree Williams and Patrick Lundberg
A Centre For Art (Level 3, R5, Achilles House)
10 July - 26 July 2008

Here is a problem to be considered. Experimental art spaces like ACFA and R103, collectives set up by young and emerging artists, usually rent space from venues like Achilles House, areas originally designed to be used as offices. These premises are perfect for parties, performances, sound works, moving image and some sorts of installation and sculpture – but for paintings and drawings, their walls invariably are an abysmal disaster. If such works are not shown in pristine circumstances, in a properly prepared environs with clean (usually) white walls and good lighting, their presentation ends up looking appalling. They end up not being taken seriously as items for contemplation and thoughtful debate. They suffer a resistance even before their own individual attributes are looked at and discussed. They become a joke.

So with the title of this show, one assumes the ‘strangers’ are the handful of gallery visitors the artists and curators don’t happen to know. The ‘jokes’ are not intended, I’m sure, to be laughable works in the sense that I’ve explained above. No artist wants their endeavours to be rudely mocked. So assuming that, perhaps these paintings – even in a ‘proper’ gallery – are actually intended to be jocular…er you know…designed to raise a smile.

Putting aside the fact that only two of the five works really make it (and one of these almost accidentally), let’s look for wit in all of them. Take the title as a literal thematic statement and look for humour or clever paradox.

First of all the two competent paintings in the show, by Denys Watkins and Roman Mitch: it was good to spend time poring over their imagery and thinking about spatial organisation. In Watkins' work, the sensitively undulating contours of his shapes, plus the skilled underpainting and manipulation of temperature in the hues, made it easily the most sophisticated item in the show. Not witty particularly, just extremely classy. A wonderful, beautifully considered object that makes you wonder why an artist of Watkins’ calibre bothered to contribute. Leaning on a window ledge, the placement of the work insulted the intelligence of its creator.

Roman Mitch’s black and white painting on a hanging piece of paper slowly grows on you, despite its scruffiness and shambolic presentation. Its geometrical configuration experimented with Alberslike internally receding planes, with an opened-out box turning into a sort of chair. The lids became its seat, backrest and legs and teased the viewer with its ambiguities.

Garth Steeper’s sort of ‘realism’ was a sentimental portrait with a corny narrative. It used humour with the reflection from a bloody steak (on a plate on the table) casting a rosy glow over the large face of a girl about to devour it. A half-clever idea in a roughly made work that only partially hinted at irony.

Sam Rountree Williams’ painting, like Steeper’s, avoided finesse. It seemed to be a strange pun on heavenly bodies: a glowing sun in front of a painted, cross-sectioned medical diagram of post-coital male and female bodies. Very oblique but somehow getting its point across. Just.

One suspected that the fact that Milli Jannides’ painting of rippling waves was one hundred per cent serious, was a joke in itself created by the context of this show and the other works around it. For this exhibition, single selections from individual artists were inadequate. By themselves they remained isolated. There was little conceptual conversation between works, no vibrant thematic argument going on. The paintings were so totally different, it was like five untranslatable languages all speaking loudly at once in this very small room.

Chronological colour separation

Blue as silver as gold: John Ward Knox, Patrick Lundberg, Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia
Newcall Gallery, Auckland
27 May - 14 June 2008

The thread that links the three artworks by these three artists is time, not colour or optical sensation as suggested by the title – though a mystical approach to the three colours might contradict that, even though different wave lengths do take different time periods to travel. The poster for the show by Kate Newby seems very apt.

Time becomes manifest in distinctly separate ways in the three works.

On opening night, John Ward Knox, in a performance, picked up a large rock in one part of the room, carried it over to another area and dropped it onto a pyramid of dark sand. The impact caused the scattering grains to spread out and form a nebula pattern on the floor. Curious visitors will over the duration of the show unknowingly transport the sand further into the remote portions of the room. Two sorts of time are involved: compact opening time; decompressed, unravelling exhibition time.

Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia presents a painting that looks like a copy of a detail from a post-impressionist work. The chronological aspect involves the time for her to learn to paint and create it, the time between the work’s production and the exhibition, and the time it takes for the visitor to identify her source. The artwork is not intrinsically interesting – only a curious foil to Ward Knox and Lundberg whose endeavours are less ordinary.

Patrick Lundberg has been doing some superb painting/wall relief sculpture projects over the past year, particularly in shows at Te Tuhi and St. Paul St. where he cut away ‘frames’ in the thickness of the gallery walls. Understated and innovative, they tested the viewer’s perception to an extreme because at first they looked like delicate drawings. His work at Newcall continues that tradition and also the ambience of the previous show by Fiona Gillmore. Using an extremely fine blue line with a compass he has carefully drawn a set of falling, fat, water drops in a grid formation. You don’t notice them unless you are close to the wall on which they are positioned. When you do, they seem to hover in front of the wall plane. They seem at first to be on a suspended clear sheet. Gradually your eyes adjust and the juicy globules fix themselves to the inner surface of the room.

In the Lundberg work space and time are intertwined. One dimension determines the other in order for the viewer to grasp what is before them. The work is about changing perception and planes, and how when you are too far away, the work disappears. It would be impossible to photograph.

This show is worth calling in on to see. Morning would be better than late afternoon, with the light brighter and more diffuse.

(Poster by Kate Newby)