Before and After

Anya Henis: Raw Feels
RM
26 November - 12 December 2009

This display of a dozen watercolours inside the gallery and five on the outside noticeboard in the corridor, reveal Anya Henis to be capable of making works totally different from the tightly composed, representational oil on canvas works she has presented at Newcall and The Physics Room. The marks on these pinned up pieces of paper, in contrast to her earlier work are fluid and loose, working the zone between order and chaos. They happen to be her best work yet I think - by far - having a generous expansive quality, free from the pinched compression of the canvases.

Some of the most exciting examples are based on wet skeletal grids that peek through the over-painted colour. The strong and frenetically applied chroma plays off against the watery underpinning that somehow retains a compositional focus through a dominantly structured pattern. These works are turbulent as clusters of frenzied marks - though not in the emotional mood of the actual colour - yet control is never too far away. The six large works have real impact. Their delicate washes are impossible to photograph but the interwoven tangled and patterned forms intrigue.

I’ve no idea why Henis has switched to such a different visual style and technique. Perhaps she maintains (or has maintained) two sorts of practice simultaneously: one carefully preplanned and tight; the other improvised, loosey-goosey and spontaneous. If Raw Feels is this show’s title, then perhaps the other work is Cooked Thinks? As a foil, this 'under-heated' exhibition is an exciting development.

(Thanks to Nick and William for organising images.)

South Korean art at room

Jin Shiu: Temporary Landing
room, 295 K’ Rd
5 November - 21 November 2009

Jin Shiu is an artist from South Korea presenting an assortment of unusual videos, sculptures and wall works in room. Two of the three of the three videos are hard to follow but the rest is impressively consistent. It is a tight conceptual package, with lots of cross referencing and repeated symbols mixed in with a lightness of touch and lack of physical weight. When at times the work is ambiguous in intention, particularly when language is involved, you wonder if there has been a problem in nuances of translation, or his English, or a lapse in your own attention.

The dominant theme is that of objects floating free in the air, thrown (as with a boomerang, tennis ball, bone, or crumpled paper ‘Earths’) or driven (there is a photo of a flying saucer made of Chinese crockery) - as a means of escape form a repressive conformist society. There is a ubiquitous sense of yearning for liberation – particularly intellectual freedom.

With this metaphor of flight, suspension or ascension he often mixes in other layers. In Juggling, the paper pulp and coloured dyes used to make a tennis ball, bone and boomerang come from other artists’ catalogues and is motivated not I think by competitive glee, but by a symbolic blending of thought – a community ethos. The flying saucer is kept pinioned to the ground by a thin layer of balloon rubber, stretched tight over inverted Chinese bowls by five guy wires attached to ratchets. Jin Shiu has a real flair for poetic tropes, but this artwork has a fetishistic physical presence too.

Another related work consists of three images of a crumpled ball made from pieces of intensely coloured sellophane. It looks like Planet Earth moving comically vertically through space. The circles are repeated in an unusual work made using a scroll of bubble-wrap plastic, where the unravelled sheet extends out of its narrow crate and up to the ceiling. Shiu has invented a method of using the material to bear vertical texts, filling up the air bubbles with khaki-coloured Korean grass to render letters which you decipher in descending order. They read “Korean art is hopeful. Korean society is rotten. When society get rotten art gets on.”

The symbolic material (grass) seems to allude to the spreading of ideas about democracy - though it could be about a Korean diaspora. Nearby is a green circular print crammed with yellow horticultural tools, as well as a drawing made with the artist’s DNA loaded stitched hair, describing a strange word he has invented (“parentses”) about the genetic origins of his personality coming from both his biological and foster parents.

This is an understated, low key exhibition, that whilst not big on visual impact, has some intriguing projects nonetheless. Worth seeing next time you call in to ARTSPACE or the Film Archives.

Thank you Nick and Xin for the images.

The Power or Inefficacy of the Word

Instructional Works
RM (295 K’ Rd)
20 August – 5 September 2009

This is a Fluxus style show (its spirit of dictated sentences is like that of say the works within Yoko Ono’s anthology, Grapefruit) where artists living outside Auckland send in instructions for actions - be they thoughts, object building or bodily movement - to be carried out by other artists and their friends. Fifteen individuals have contributed works that are conceptual in the sense of being held in the mind of their creators, to be then transmitted by typewriter (or word processor) to paper. These are hopefully then internalised by an audience. The typed word is the material here, even though it could be argued it is merely serving as a conduit for pure thought (if there is such a thing).

Thus there is a dematerialised feel to the show. It is deliberately low in sensory or experiential impact, and not really successfully competing with the other art venues grouped around it on Karangahape Road – if compete is what RM wants to do; and it may not. However many of these works don’t need a gallery to exist. The RM website would be a far more effective means of communicating them than having cards pinned to a wall or stacked on a table.

For example, Ian-John Hutchinson’s work involves slips of paper bearing names of murdered journalists or political prisoners. He invites you to recite their names individually for thirty minutes as a form of mantra, and I assume to perhaps later dig out more information about them. Elaine Tin Nyo requests you describe your favourite food and where and when you last enjoyed it. Here we have a collecting of information as well as an exercise in contemplation of taste sensation and memory, and also perhaps an incentive for further research.

Some thoughts have great impact through the mental imagery they generate, or the physical objects that come out of their comprehension. Daniel du Bern’s newspaper carpet glued to the floor gives you a recap over last month’s news as you walk around the space looking around your feet. Markus Degerman has recreated some of RM’s oddly aligned walls as a beautiful freestanding sculpture of plasterboard, wood and paint, while Amit Charan’s project presents a torch powered with Wellington sunlight, with a set of replacement batteries being charged up by the window from Auckland solar conditions for when it is returned.

Perhaps the more a visitor participates in a show like this the more they will get out of it – though that might be a tired platitude. Good art still is dependent on the thinking skills of artists, not their audience - and somehow this project by a group of artists seems lacklustre. There are not many carrots in the artworks to tempt audience participation, to make them want to do more than nibble – to take a big bite and get involved. Nothing here is distinctly memorable, though the Degerman wall sculpture is really intriguing, and the Charan torch clever. Nothing that really stays in the mind, that is hauntingly special and important.

In descending order, the above images are of works by Susie Pratt, Ian-John Hutchinson, Elaine Tin Nyo, Daniel du Bern, Markus Degerman and Amit Charan (2). Photos by Lauren Winstone.

Motorway paradise

Cellulite Rose: Island Resort
Room (295 Karangahape Rd)
14 May - 30 May 2009

Artists collective Room, formerly Room 103, have moved. They are now firmly ensconced in the middle of Auckland’s ‘Art mile’, positioned very close to MIC, and opposite ARTSPACE and Ivan Anthony. It’s an inspired location, and the exhibiting space has a very different ambience from the old downtown venue in Achilles House. Much less office-like, it has a concrete floor, no carpet, and a clean rectangular shape with no nooks and crannies.

Cellulite Rose’s show is a great start, based on a landscaping oddity just around the corner and easily visible from the Newton Road overpass, facing East. I look at this peculiarity almost every day when I walk to K’ Rd to check out the shows. In the gallery she (I’m assuming a female gender here) has installed a large projected DVD loop on one wall, and two much smaller LCDs on the opposite one. The above three images are stills.

The DVDs show the artist (another assumption) taking advantage of a landscaped pond and incorporated line of trees in the middle of the Northwestern motorway. The A shaped form is tucked into the southern edge between Upper Queen St and Newton Rd – near Ian McKinnon Drive.

The artist has decided to use the newly discovered ACC amenity as an island resort, to put up a hammock between a couple of cabbage trees and use a lilo to shoo away the ducks and splash around in the sun - amidst the noise and fumes. I imagine she (and recreational equipment) got dropped off by friends who also took the photos. It would be too dangerous to go there by foot.

So, as art, is this interesting? Obviously it is an entertaining prank, a bit of light-hearted exhibitionism, but it also raises questions about big cities and how little the general public know about planning decisions that affect their daily interaction in the civic space.
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This ‘resort’ seems to be some sort of stormwater outflow that has been cosmeticised to help beautify the motorway. As such it is a good idea, but one which because it has been successful, has also been invisible. Hundreds of cars drive past it every day, with not one driver ever realising it is there. Just an occasional haven for aquatic birds and nosey-parker artists.

(Thank you to the artist and Nick Spratt for the images.)