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.

Devouring envelope

Sonya Lacey: From what position do you speak and in the name of what or whom?
Window, Auckland University Library foyer
16 October - 14 November 2008.

Recent Elam graduate, Sonya Lacey, is normally associated with sculpture or drawings, so this interactive, conceptual project is unusual. The title implies an interest in the political positioning of the viewer through their background demography – economic status, race, gender, education, sexual orientation and so on – looking at characteristics of privilege and power relationships within the Window audience and examining what they might assume about themselves in relation to the wider community.

Yet ostensibly, at first glance, her project is more about public speaking as a performative skill, sourcing material from various online questionnaires in teaching programmes to form questions which when answered, feed into the Window project and shape it. You yourself, if you wish, can click into the online component here and participate by answering the twenty or so questions.

In the Window gallery there is no direct reference to the online questionnaire, only a large papier maché ball on the floor and a stack of essays in the foyer by Cherie Lacey (The artist’s sister perhaps?) Her wordy meandering text centres around Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on face–to–face encounters, while exploring the anthropological notion of ‘the gift’ as presented to the artist, a theme that vaguely continues within the online project, with the free use of other people’s questionnaires, and the reader’s possible contribution to her project. Basically though, the work seems to be this dull and indulgent essay - not what is in the gallery – that hogs the spotlight.

In other words the frame is the art in this show. The contextualising supporting material has usurped the exhibit. What was the footnote has gobbled up the essay, smacked its lips with a quiet burp, and caused the art to disappear, only to take its place. Like a cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest.

See what you make of the online questionnaire? Though hardly riveting, it is more absorbing than the gallery project. Only slightly.

What is interesting is the existence of galleries like Window, and how non-art students using the library might feel about such esoteric presentations. They probably, like me, believe in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and that – as in any field - experimental research, no matter how inaccessible or dry, is a good thing. However it is only a small community that enjoys this kind of practice and its very public presence in the foyer probably antagonises the rest, turning off any empathy they might have hitherto had for art.

There is a case that this ostrich-like attitude is damaging, this confrontational stance that deliberately ignores an opportunity to win a new audience. It prefers to waste it in favour of an agonistic rhetoric that only a few highly educated extremists will understand and where there is no artwork at all to be considered. Only family musings.

Cohesive Combination

This Much is Certain: Alexandra Savtchenko, Sonya Lacey, and Sarah Rose (Elam Grad Exhibition)
George Fraser Gallery
7 May - 24 May 2008

These three Elam graduates showing together in the George Fraser have come up with a surprisingly tight exhibition – even though it was their supervisors who actually selected them for this project.

So why does it succeed? First of all, and most obviously, Sonya Lacey’s Structure for Standing while Talking (After Pistoletto) – a steel L-shaped sculpture that looks like a freestanding support for a lean-on-able bar in a pub - has ties with Sarah Rose’s Open Space, a large sign holder that looks like part of some monkey bars from a children’s playground.

Both major works function as metal forms (one is stripped of paint, the other is powdercoated) to be enjoyed as sculptures, but they could also work with human bodies swinging or leaning on them. They ‘beckon’ to passers by to be touched or climbed on, and reek of function and bodily interaction, not contemplative delectation. The participation of people with their rigid forms though is not essential. In fact, Rose doesn’t want people to touch her public sculpture, but because it looks like it is designed for children, and not art, her wishes will probably end up being ignored.

Rose has two other works in the show. One is a banner lying on the floor that is strangely folded so that its configured patterns point at the Open Space work outside the door. The other is a length of steel wire rope hanging from the ceiling and wall forming a suspended parabola. Its gravity induced, soft, round form is a vivid contrast to the rectangular hard contours of Open Space, and refreshingly casual.

Sonya Lacey’s Structure for Talking was once painted but she decided to strip that layer off and expose the ground, buffed steel. Her graphite drawings show that interest in surface, and both her preoccupations and Rose’s link well with Savtchenko’s video. Using a laptop Savtchenko presents films of billowing volcanic ash spilling out of erupting craters. She has also made a substraction work (related to the methods of seventies artists like Billy Apple) where she sanded and chipped away encrustations of paint from an internal gallery archway. Her removal process and images of suspended ash particles high in the air are a clever foil to the methodologies of her two colleagues. This is a rigorous, austere exhibition, but clearly a thoughtful one. It shows good teamwork without downplaying the significance of each individual contributor.