Indoor sculpture garden

Seung Yul Oh: Bogle Bogle
The New Dowse
13 February - 30 May 2010

Seung Yul Oh first attracted attention at Elam in the early 2000s as an amazingly drawer of whimsical fairytale cartoons that combined the saccharine with the intestinal and excretory - as well as being a maker of flowing resin sculpture with bizarre bubbly, pockmarked warty textures. Since then his work has become less organic and less process-oriented and much more industrial, with an impeccable finish and delicate pastel colouration.

The current sculptural installation at The New Dowse features capsule-like forms that are akin to ‘kinder eggs’ that have taken on appetising confectionary hues. These are a variation of the work he recently exhibited in Te Papa’s sculpture terrace and Starkwhite, that were ‘egg-birds’. Bogle Bogle is more theatrical and staged in three connected rooms, with three small inquisitive rats made of resin that sometimes balance on the ‘egg’ tops.

There are also some large vertical matchsticks, an abstract headless elephant made of curved arch forms, to one side a 3D sculpture of a cube covered with a white sheet, and several brightly coloured cubes, these being drawn orthographic forms that have had their sides intensely coloured and then their shapes cut out of flat metal sheets, on stands so they remain vertically positioned on the floor.

I tend to prefer this artist’s nastier and messier earlier work for here he seems to be chasing Michael Parekowhai. Yet this show is not bland or too cute. It has a pattern that intrigues too.

First of all the doubled-over title. Is it a portmanteau word that blends bugle with ogle? Is it like the display, something that has an oblique logic? To do with binaries perhaps?

I say that because looking at the sculptural elements, there are match heads (symbols perhaps for revelatory epiphanies?) that look like the giant capsules, two sorts of cube (flat and with body) and two sorts of colour (pastel and saturated). Plus two varieties of spectator: rats and living humans.

What can one make of it? The show seems to be about passivity and action and the agency of the gallery visitor. Something about thinking as an activity? The rats and people seem to indicate curiosity, the capsules props to be ingested, the matches lit (ideas maybe?), while the elephant is memory and the sheet covered cube the hidden past. The cut-out Platonic forms can be interpreted as hypothetical actions, while the 3D ones are actions of profound consequence.

Bogle Bogle is a buoyant, entertaining show, an indoor, walk-through ‘sculpture garden’ that holds up well against the fiddly architectural trimmings of the New Dowse arches, fake walls and doorways. It is worth investigating on your way down the corridor to Bill Viola.

The International Arts Festival at The New Dowse: Bill Viola

Bill Viola: The Messenger
The New Dowse
20 February – 4 July 2010

Floating deep within the choppy blue water we can see what looks like the deathly white corpse of a drowned man. Its sunken form is fragmented by the agitated surface of the wind-raked water as it divides up, its separated parts tenuously linked by wobbly ropes of pale fluid flesh. Slowly it seems to elongate and rise up, but then it stabilises, and hesitates - only to gradually descend once more.

Then the stationary jelly-like form has a change of mind: it ascends to the surface, only to reveal a naked man very much alive. We hear him gasping for breath – but not at all stressed - as he bobs up and down in the rippling azure sea, filling his lungs with oxygen. Then with a thin line of bubbles pouring out of one nostril, he gradually descends once more - to hover as a small amoeboid blob about fifteen feet down. The process continues four times before it starts repeating the original cycle once more.

We see this film on a single screen in a very dark room with two benches. The screen is tall and the seats not close – while the image itself is ambiguous, mostly appearing to be belly up, but other times face down and headless. This disturbing confusion between life and death is accentuated by the refracted dappled light which makes a healthy-looking body look bleached of blood and anaemic when submerged.

The lack of panic on the filmed man’s face references a near drowning experience Viola once had as a boy, where he was close to death but obliviously peaceful and serene. A quick-witted uncle fished him out, saving his life.

The Messenger thus oscillates in its mood, for more than calm, the actor has a hint of a twinkle in his eye, yet the tone of his pale submerged body is stridently alarming. There is something oddly subversive about this hypnotically beguiling 1996 work that denies the permanence of death: a mocking mysticism that seems to espouse the concept of reincarnation but which in its very realistic symbolism, I personally find very creepy indeed.