Pleasures of the Bodily and Binary

Richard Frater: So Long The Difficulties of Being Single Newcall 11 November – 29 November 2008 When does a collection of seemingly disparate sculptures become an installation so that an overall coherence is apparent where all the parts interconnect? Where there is a sense of only one work engaging the visitor? I’m not sure if that happens in this show, but it is certainly close, though the separate components retain a strong individuality. Into the T-shaped Newcall space Frater has carefully positioned ten varied sculptures. These heighten a viewer’s (self) awareness of bodily dynamics between Newcall’s walls, window, door gaps, floor and ceiling - and the light (or lack of) on those surfaces. Despite his droll exhibition title about ‘being single’ – a bachelor or single artwork perhaps - the show seems really about binary combinations, the tension between pairs, and movement around, over, under and through them. This is a meticulously deceptive and extremely subtle show that needs time to absorb because the links are not at first obvious. From two calls to Newcall, here’s some of what I spotted: (1.) The title seems to be about getting married, but is nothing of the kind. Other appearances deceive too. Frater has a video loop which seems initially to be of walls of ice bricks slowly dissolving in a large tank of water. These on reflection probably are plastic or polystyrene sheets collapsing in a mineral solvent. Their behaviour is subtly different from dissolving ice. (2.) There are two fabric rectangles on which Frater has printed large photographs. One is folded, the other spread out. The folded one by the window is grey and mottled like the gallery’s concrete floor. The other spread image is silvery and of rumpled sheets on a bed. It is itself creased and rumpled. (3.) An isolated freestanding door is placed in the centre of the entrance to the stem of the gallery’s T-shape, coming from a nearby wall at the base. Its chrome doorknob sparkles in the light from two panels in the ceiling, as does a similarly sized, silver-plated, mirror egg standing on the floor. (4.) There is a glowing fluorescent tube on the floor with one end raised by a vertical strip of plastic packaging tape going to the ceiling. The tube’s length seems to be the same length as a projecting wooden shelf on the opposite wall. (5.) That shelf has been planed to strip off its topmost weathered surface. On it are scattered nearly thirty tags, thin plastic strips that seem to have come from the sticky sides of band-aids which they used to protect. On the adjacent wall in large letters is the name Andrei, possibly referring to the great Russian film director, Tarkovsky – famous for his use of natural elements and long pans. The letters have been shaped by cutting out and peeling off the skin of the gib surface. As Matt Harris warns in an excellent accompanying essay that advises against interpreting Frater’s exhibition, these works need to be moved through and experienced, not thought about as semaphores or codes that require translation. To do that though means being aware of connections like those I’ve mentioned. They provide a pleasurable tension and keep the mind active. The show has not been built for robotic blockheads with legs on ‘automatic pilot’ but viewers willing to engage with, analyse, and compare the carefully placed ingredients.

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.

Concrete 'canvas' / carpet cutouts

Richard Frater
Te Tuhi
25 July - 22 August 2009

This project by Frater continues the series of installations involving carpet he has created for venues like the ARTSPACE office and HSP in Christchurch. At Te Tuhi it is different though. He has been given a gallery with a floor covered in impeccable dark blue weave, and allowed to cut into it, remove shapes and fold sections back. The result has been to expose sections of the concrete floor where splodges of brushed-on glue were used to fasten the carpet.

Peeling away layers of carpet has revealed dried gluey incrustations normally flattened out and hidden after the wet adhesive was initially brushed onto the floor. Broken away, encrusted little islands have formed on the carpet’s folded back, lined underside when Frater later yanked his Matissean-shaped sections away.

This pale brown residue is mostly seen on the concrete and is surprisingly beautiful with its delicate transparent hues. Parallel bristle marks abound within the hardened translucent paste, plus splashes of spilled white wall paint and other more watery stains. There is an archaeology going on here on the floor that relates to what Frater’s ACFA colleague Patrick Lundberg has been doing on gallery walls, but more obvious. The marks are more spectacular.

Frater’s removed shapes are often undulating lyrical arabesques or skinny weedy slashes and they provide a sort of frame for the carpet-layer’s accidental ‘artistry’ - on a concrete ‘canvas’ that peeks through. There is an odd rivalry going on between inner and outer marks separated by several years. A bizarre, inadvertent collaboration; a duet.

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.

Don’t bloody move. Ever!

Richard Frater: Still
HSP, Christchurch
5 May - 16 May 2009

Three oddly shaped configurations are fastened to the floor – made of pieces of grey carpet butted together - different tones, some brown tinges. They create strong negative shapes on the honey-coloured varnished wooden floor and are oriented around two white columns and two wall pilasters. One configuration is a single piece of one tone textile; another has two; the other three.

At first glance these elements seem to be a nod to sixties conceptualist Mel Bochner and his use of painted shape dictated by the combined lengths of straight edges: and with bits of dyed string and light cord dropped on top as Duchampian footnotes. There is also an incorporated rectangle of grey silk with screened-on wrinkles, and a hole punched into the centre of one white wall. The impetuous mixed with the calculated. Reason alongside passion. Sensitivity besides the gross. Which is which?

Shape; tone; line; dot – all in an unusual in situ presentation. What is Frater up to here? There is a strange subtext of foul tempered violence that the space is on the receiving end of; as in slam that wall, stomp that carpet. The nap is scuffed up. Lots of boot marks, some wheels too. The ‘string’ could be wool pulled out of the edges of the weave.

The peculiar shapes seem also vaguely connected to the letters of the word ‘Still’; the carpet articulating in a roundabout way the S and the two Ls, the white columns the I, and the wall pilasters the T.

This is a very focussed exhibition, featuring a calculatedly limited means compared to his more complex recent display at Newcall. The show looks simple but the more you examine it, the stranger and more intriguing its decoding possibilities become.

(A big thank you to the artist and Paul Johns for the images)

Building a Future

Architecture for the Nation: New artists show 2008
Curated by Brian Butler and Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
14 June – 19 July 2008

This show debunks the traditional notion of architecture to make it something principally collective like national identity. It posits the idea that “architecture has little to do with the construction of a shelter or dwelling. It is an arrangement of social thoughts.” An interesting concept to confuse its qualities with that of nationhood. Next time it is stormy, cold and wet, and you are caught in an icy downpour, just stand underneath ‘an arrangement of social thoughts’ and you will stop feeling miserable.

Despite the nuttiness of the wording of the introduction, the six artists are worth looking at.

Richard Frater’s has two sets of sculpture. One is a couple of twisted, wonky hoses forms that look like massively distorted hula hoops. They are lines suspended in space that are deliberately devoid of refinement. Their ugliness makes them funny – like say the works of Francis Upritchard – so that grotesque charm in fact reinvents beauty. Their lack of gracefulness is their point.

Out in the ARTSPACE office Frater has rearranged the ‘drop-in’ reading room to present a texturally rich carpet work with an ear motif. His way of commenting on contemporary art’s ‘arrangement of social thoughts.’ Strange looping tapeworm forms made of knitting wool are scattered over the floor, making the work beautifully rhythmic like a painting or piece of music but creating something that also suggests William Burroughs’ notion of language being a virus.

Rangituhia Hollis has a line-up of four DVD projections, butted together in a row to explore iwi identity. They represent his pepeha, a matrix of interlinking communal references such as relatives playing piggyback in the local swimming pool, his first student flat, animations of ancestral axes flying around a room and dancing in clusters, and virtual eels being jettisoned out of the window of the Waipiro Trading Company to cruise over the rooftops. Hollis has a flair for editing and image movement. There is a nice restless energy that underpins the excitement of his videos. He has an excellent text by Anna-Marie White accompanying his entry in the online catalogue.

Alexandra Savtchenko uses the neon signage on top of the Newcall building (on the Khyber pass Rd, Symonds St intersection) where the gallery she exhibits in is set up. She has removed the two ‘C’ letters from the top of the tower and transported them to ARTSPACE so you get ‘cc’ (‘carbon copy’ or ‘closed circuit’) there and ‘new all’ when you look at the building out of the ARTSPACE office window. A lovely poetic link to the social and utopian vision of the show.

Ash Kilmartin’s concise pencil drawings on long sheets of paper are single-point perspective, tilted orthogonal diagrams of walls with deep apertures - but with peculiar vertical parallel lines. You have to stand close to see them. They are like the anamorphic charcoal drawings of Mike Parr or the nineties paintings of James Ross in that they are deliberately optically unresolvable. They border on incoherence. This riveting, intelligently supersubtle work is based on two modernist buildings she has photographed, examined and documented. There is a superb mini-essay by Sam Rountree-Williams about it in the catalogue.

The two works by Simon Lawrence use seemingly disparate components with which the viewer needs to make connections. One is a map of the world, showing countries and dominant land formations, that is leaning against the wall. Nearby on the floor are some china animals (a squirrel and a kangaroo), a ‘Chinaman’ puppet head, and two photographs of a rabbit and elephant. The work seems an ironic dig at anti-Asian racism.

Lawrence’s main piece of sculpture is a variation of a work he showed last year in Christchurch Art Gallery in the Another Destination show. It has a flash-gun that fires regularly on a timer, and thin taped-together plastic tubes that extend up from a reversed vacuum cleaner to the ARTSPACE ceiling. They have paper streamers that move when the machine is turned on. There is also a video of a long spiralling shot from a moving helicopter, circling above a big city at night. The movement of the air near the ARTSPACE ceiling relates to the moving aerial camera pan on the video, and the flash to the twinkling city lights.

This work also has a social interpretation, the flash implicating the gallery visitor, the video the wider community, and the air in the tubes, breath from conversations bearing thoughts. It is cunningly ambiguous.

Tuafale Tanoa’i (Linda T)’s contribution is an ongoing programme of interviews made on the site in a back gallery that is used as a studio. She chats with various Māori and Pacific island artists and media personalities, such as Fiona Clark, Edith Amituanai and Paora Maxwell, and plays the conversations on a bank of monitors that have user-friendly headphones and accompanying armchairs. Tanoa’i is good at picking charismatic thoughtful individuals who hold the viewer’s attention, and who have a vision for this country’s future.

Architecture here (and so the gallery itself) is clearly a metaphor, a structure for the construction of a harmonious society, like a whare or church that shelters its communities from destructive elements, and this work is a key component in understanding the exhibition’s title. The exhibition overall is cohesive but with stimulating variety. The six artists have provided a particularly interesting group of works to spend time with. Don't miss it.