Brad Lochore paintings at Two Rooms

Brad Lochore: Roughs
Two Rooms
11 March - 19 April 2010

London based / Wellington born painter Brad Lochore presents six white/pale grey paintings in the Two Rooms studio space just down Putiki Street from the Two Rooms gallery.

In the past Lochore has gained international recognition for his images of cast shadows from flimsy grids or plants. In this show he explores glossy reflection and the sagging surfaces of clear or white polythene, which he has placed on stretchers and photographed. He has then used the slides as a starting point for his paintings.

They are called ‘roughs’ because they are not brush-mark free, nor smoothly ‘photographic’. They are subtly painterly in the way Lochore has rendered the properties of a shiny surface raked over by light. Sometimes the polythene has stretch marks, little blips, tears or striations in lines, as if the soft plastic sheet has been stressed or pulled in opposite directions.

A couple of the paintings are so white and glary that they look more like cotton sheets than polythene. This is because the material dazzles in its entirety without catching reflections on any wrinkles. In other words they look freshly laundered, and without the twinkling highlights that come with shiny plastic.

Lochore is obviously fascinated by the nuances of illuminated surface that can be created through the manipulation of very pale greys, when carefully put in contrasting juxtapositions. He likes the restrained drama of scattered – but considered - specks and flicks that advance or retreat through the dominant picture plane of stretched, glossy and translucent skin, or skitter across it. Occasionally they seem to be landscapes in disguise, with bleached cloud formations over milky beaches and streaky seas.

This is intriguing work, an austere form of photorealism that flirts with monochromatic abstraction by replicating sheets of synthetic materials and lingering over properties of surface. These paintings are strangely beautiful and sensual, for all their insistent severity.

Cornelia Parker comes to Auckland

Cornelia Parker: No Man’s Land
Two Rooms
11 March - 10 April 2010

Cornelia Parker is highly regarded internationally for her ability to think up projects that unexpectedly startle, usually because of some process of violent transformation that alters a fairly commonplace object so it takes on unexpected shapes. She is also esteemed because of her ability to infuse it with a metaphor via that transmuting process.

This Two Rooms show has four varieties of work from this English artist that bring out these qualities well.

The first is two silver bugles hanging from the gallery ceiling. Once they were identical, now they are very different, for one is flattened and very thin, squashed by some kind of roller or press and arranged parallel to the floor. The other hangs vertically. They are enigmatic because the flat version is not a shadow of the rounded one. They are opposites in alignment as well as morphology.

There is humour because bugles are meant to awaken, to call troops to rise up out of bed and become active. The flattened one, as Monty Python would put it, is ‘extinct’, and ‘one ex-bugle’. Decidedly dead and unplayable, it exudes lifelessness.

The second variety uses rattlesnake venom and its antidote, the former mixed with black ink, the latter with white paint - to make five framed glassed-over paintings hanging on the wall, for with folded paper they end up as Rorschach-style mirrored blobs. The poison is folded and squeezed in the paper first - and then that paper is opened out to dry. Then globs of antidote are painted over the ink, squeezed together and reopened again.

With these ‘pelvic butterflies’ of thin black ink and thick white paint you get different tactile qualities. The deadly ink is runny and softly fluid while the healing squashed paint forms veins and capillaries that look like slices of hardened brain. They become fluttering insects emerging from an autopsy tray.

Magnum bullets provide the raw material for the third sort of image, their individual leads being extruded so that the mineral substance becomes like thin fuse wire. This metal thread is made into varieties of mesh with different sorts of overall shape and width of rectangle. The woven pieces of lead netting are like a snare for death, a lethal web for the unwary that is compacted and crushed in certain areas like a folded, twisted veil. Each of the eight expressive gauzes are crammed between two sheets of glass when framed, so that shadows create a second striking image behind them.

Most of Parker’s exhibition is taken up with three black-dyed tents of double–layered netting, pinioned to the floor with cords and bags filled with lead shot. Originally Red Cross tents used for disaster relief they have become malevolent traps with added camouflaging spirals made from recycled clothing. They are hopeless for providing shelter and would only entangle hapless nosey visitors. With these loose and sinister grids these freestanding constructions cleverly echo the ‘bullet net’ works on the walls and their shadows.

Parker here presents a beautifully hung and wittily selected show, each item having some quality of built-in menace. Hopefully we’ll see more such displays from her here again.

Two Rooms residency show

Joachim Bandau: New watercolours
Two Rooms
11 March - 10 April 2010

The seven large watercolours shown here by Joachim Bandau - the result of last year's residency in Putiki St - explore different degrees of transparency using diluted black. They look like aerial views of piles of tinted glass rectangles that get darker in the centre where the stack is higher. This experienced German sculptor makes these watercolours using wide but very finely bristled brushes. The granule free, overlapping oblong washes are delicate and consistently even, with a very fine line at the edges.

These works are technically exquisite in the control of the thin ink washes but there is too much work that is almost identical in its very centrally composed design. The show gets a little samey. The best ones are atypical. These are either lopsided stacks or spread apart between the top and bottom of the paper sheet.

The greatest, most refreshing surprise is one work totally different, without the dark tones of the others. It is not so extreme in its blackness, and consists of diagonal shafts of grey light, as if Bandau has gone out into the New Zealand landscape, or perhaps (gasp!) squizzed at a McCahon or two. It has a fragility all its own because of the tightly controlled and very limited tonal range, and the leaning vectors of its parallel lines. It is more nuanced.

Bandau is a fine artist but he needs to think about selection and how to engage his audience with a more varied, less ‘production line’ range of options. However his watercolours are unusually attractive with their dark compelling, transparent voids - if not repetitive.

Elizabeth Thomson: lost in space

Elizabeth Thomson: La Planète Sauvage
Two Rooms
24 November 2009 - 22 December 2009

This Liz Thomson show is a step backwards from the sparkling fluoro, overly complicated, glass ‘mini-mattress’ relief sculptures she showed upstairs at Two Rooms last year. She has reverted to the plant forms she is famous for by attaching the small, painted zinc, pohutukawa leaves to shallow-relief ‘planet’ discs and wall surfaces to make up a sort of dotty linear drawing. It looks as if she has made too many tiny leaves and rather than throw them away wasted, decided to keep on using them, even in ‘outer space’ where in that context they look ludicrous.

Apart from the irritating leaves, the drawings of ellipses in perspectively receding alignments (Astrophysics Series) look intriguing – foreshortened saucers on the flat surfaces of relief discs is a clever idea with great visual wit. And the large white projecting shallow disc (Voyage Sauvage) on the other side of the room, peppered with glass ‘mothballs’ on sticks, is absorbing too, with the small balls serving as microcosms to the ‘mother’-macro.

Thomson’s ‘Planète Sauvage’ series are strikingly dramatic lunar images, but spoilt by being shallow relief. Flat discs flush with the wall, devoid of mass, would have been less clunky and, if less over-elaborate in surface textures, much superior. And the huge perspective ‘leaf’ drawing of receding ‘Versailles’ runways on the large wall looks like a strange form of oddly delicate folk art. It is too awkward to succeed because the different–sized leaves and horizontal ovals don’t quite co-ordinate to match the angle of the tilted lanes.

There is nothing here that is a total success – usually because the smooth rounded contours of the three-dimensional circles are such a distraction – but Voyage Sauvage comes close with its comparative understatement and reflexivity. It alone is worth a second visit.

The Shimmering Lakes ‘wall drawing’ image above is at Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington.

Evanescent Jenkinson

Megan Jenkinson: Second silence
Two Rooms
26 November - 22 December 2009

It does not seem so long ago (though in fact it is eighteen months) since Megan Jenkinson’s big show of photographs in the whole of Two Rooms. This exhibition extends some of the themes of that display – particularly the lenticular works.

Like that exhibition this one in the upstairs gallery is a bit fragmented, with three sorts of subject matter. One series is a continuation of Atmospheric Optics shown last time, a lenticular interpretation of the Aurora Australis over the Antarctica icescape using treated images of curtain fabric. I find it somewhat gross, too garish and too theatrical.

Similarly for The Spectral series, inspired by the colour theories of Goethe, depicting mystic books and ceremonial tea ware. For me, it is too much like being in a science museum, and seems gimmicky and tacky. Note that I personally have been wearing a hologram watch (of a rose) for the past 25 years, so in principle I like this sort of evanescent image. Of the three Spectral works the standout photograph is an image of a Moorish tea-set (with beautiful gold lettering in Arabic) on an inlaid wooden table. It flashes to dark-blue linear contours over a pale blue field when you move past it.

Jenkinson’s best works using this sort of technology are when she demonstrates restraint, and knocks back the impact of the colour. The Heavens Opened in this way are particularly effective, and although the titles of the four works reference certain Old Master paintings you don’t need that art historical baggage to enjoy them. The effect is akin to the odd experience of seeing distant sheet lightning in broad daylight, when the sun is still exposed and streaming through faraway (non–stormy) clouds.

These cloudscapes have a smoky brown / amber softness, with the delicate sheen of a coppery undercoat. The abrupt silvery change when you pass is more a tonal flash – like the Moorish cups – not a chordal chromatic blast as with The Atmospherics. The optical quality is much closer to pearlescence than say iridescence.

My view is that Jenkinson should stick to this kind of subtlety, using ‘earth’ and not ‘synthetic’ colours. The effect is not ‘in your face’, being more nuanced and closer to our everyday sensations outdoors when we detect light conditions changing quickly within a few seconds. It focusses on the pleasures of observation when contemplating the meteorological, when you are looking out the kitchen window.

Grey water

Simon Morris: Folding Water
Two Rooms
16 October -14 November 2009

A dozen stretcher paintings and one wall drawing are currently being presented by Simon Morris in the large downstairs Two Rooms space. As most of us now expect from Morris, the focus in these works is the delicate nuances of brushed on diluted pigment, the textured textiles it is applied to, discreet tonally controlled underpainting over those textiles, and complicated (or simple) linear configurations that often state the time of physical execution within their titles.

The big, gridded up drawing takes up the central end wall. Its thin looping, double-jointed grey line snakes its way (up and down in stacked-up but joined round-cornered rectangles) from the left side to the right - and back again in a reversed alignment. The thin black acrylic wash becomes grey on the white wall and could almost be mottled India Ink but has no sheen. This transparency helps you grasp its pre-planned trajectory quicker through its doubling over earlier sections and through making chosen options unambiguous. Its sense of directional inevitability is more pronounced here than in, say, his recent wall painting at the Adam.

Morris’s mixture of liquid ‘grey’ paint highlights every flick of his brush edge at the corners (their curved lines seem to have been completed after the vertical and horizontal components), every little trail of bubbles or splatter, each minute drop in registered edge through horizontal templates. The line takes on a bodily vulnerability with its exposed building processes acquiring an unexpected metaphorical (let’s say ‘psychological’) dimension.

That ‘expressive’ (you could if pushed, almost say ‘expressionist’) quality is as if his bodily – er 'manual' – processes are linked to the contingencies of his emotional core. Not sweepingly of the arm of course but through wrist movement, within the narrow parallel contours of the moving grey ribbon.

Morris’s square stretcher paintings are less transparent and so less varied in his range of marks and tones found within the line. The yellow and orange trajectories that form very simple mandala-like configurations tend to have a gentle pulse. They are sufficiently opaque to make this throbbing a subtle sensation that can easily be missed. With the other black-lined works the opacity is sooty and matt, and with the thickness of line, solidly robust.

Some unusual inclusions for Morris in this show are a suite of Daily Paintings with thick vertical bands, where he applies paint every day but leaves untouched a strip that he painted the day before. These works are the antithesis of the wall work and so immaculate in their tonal control they look bland, as if seventies décor. Because the band shapes are repeated with no directional variation, there is a rippling sensation horizontally across the deepening tones or intensifying saturation levels, much like curtain fabric.

Personally I like the complicated ‘time’ paintings much more, especially those that traverse the picture plane only to double-back to the edge of origin - for they are brilliantly designed. Morris’s inventiveness here lies in the dropping down (or raising up) of flipped-over returning modules to form a repeatable, intertwined relationship between the two overlapping linear directions. This shrewdly calculated aspect, worked out beforehand on computer - more than the clever incorporation of time of paint application into the title - is what makes these remarkable grids mysterious and memorable.

Shin exhibition

Jeena Shin: Fractus
Two Rooms
16 October - 14 November 2009

Upstairs in the narrower and smaller of the two Two Rooms galleries, Jeena Shin presents a long thin painting extending horizontally along the main wall. At first glance black, it really consists of variations of dark grey, a ribbon of folding and unravelling tangrams - made up of differently toned triangles - that skirts the edges of a skinny poised oblong that could be an elegant hovering beam, a recessed slot, or an ebony rectangular sash – even a silken belt.

The tumbling pyramids within it are small on the far left, rapidly increasing in size (while becoming flatter) towards the middle and then decreasing a little over to the right. The spatial properties of these crisply delineated geometric forms are designed to flicker and twist, yet they also depend very much on the changing hourly light, darkening and deepening as the day progresses.

Despite the elegance of the narrow composition that overall is perfectly positioned on the long wall, the fact that Shin has used five hardboard panels creates a problem, for they should align perfectly butted together - but they don’t (though it is hard to tell from the above photograph). The edges aren’t flush. This makes you wish she had painted it directly onto the wall as in the recent Adam show, or currently in the ARTSPACE stairwell. It would look sensational: a long black strip embedded into the Two Rooms architecture.

There are two dilemmas here: Firstly the panels are not perfectly identical in measurement. It is not as if they are and have been hung poorly. It is the height discrepancy in one which though small, in this kind of pristine practice is a serious disaster. Secondly, maybe panels with a palpable thickness are the wrong option. Perhaps Shin should have painted on metal sheets that hardly project out from the surface of the wall at all. Or as I’ve said, worked on the wall directly. The gallery can still sell such a project adapted for other walls and other sites, if salability is an issue.

Yet for all that, this flawed work is still worth seeing. For this artist, Fractus 2009 is unusual because of the range of shape sizes within its unravelling concertina strip, and the way the dark negative shapes on its upper and lower edges interact with similarly angular ones in the centre. Plus there are also unexpected surprises in the detail, such as series of spikey star-shapes on the left-hand side, and a flattening of less solid forms on the right. Oddly the coal coloured, crystalline forms get localised within the stratalike horizontal structure, as if some sort of bizarrely twisting, geological process is slowly at work. A lot to think about.

Across the watery divide

Isaac Julian – Western Union: Small boats
Two Rooms
19 August – 10 October 2009

This is the third film in Isaac Julian’s trilogy that was started by True North, seen at St. Paul St in 2004 and – in my view - the highlight of the Turbulence Triennial.

The second film Fantome Afrique (2005) never got here, but this last work in the series seems very different. It continues Julian’s interest in extraordinary landscapes and human movement. This time instead of individual explorers it is focused on the plight of refugees who in an attempt to escape deplorable economic hardship try to travel in small, overloaded boats from North Africa to Sicily, often with insufficient fuel or food.

This film though does not have the magnificent viewing conditions of True North – with three screens in a wide room. The Two Rooms venue is disappointingly narrow and like a long corridor, with a couch some distance from a single screen. Too far away to get really drawn into the imagery, as you should.

Small Boats is a sensual treat (what you can see of it, you really have to walk up close) with bleak white hills that seem to be salt, contrasting with the azure of the Mediterranean. Julian has also incorporated lavish interiors of Palazzo Gangi, a chateau used by Visconti to make The Leopard. The work is very studied and over contrived, mainly because of the choreography of Russell Maliphant, with writhing underwater bodies, and figures rolling down ornate staircases. The luxurious house, an excessively paradisical symbol perhaps for the good life the boat people crave, seems to over-complicate the concept of the film – though it provides extraordinary viewing.

In fact the best imagery is very simple, of faded smashed up boats washed onto the beach. They really make the point of the story in a grippingly succinct fashion, hitting home free from any fanciful or mannered conceit. They are the tragic true stars of the film, not the gyrating actors or very still landscape.

Language matters

Send
Two Rooms
11 September - 10 October 2009

Six artists from Australia and New Zealand present a varied language-fixated show in the large downstairs Two Rooms space, demonstrating a wide range of approaches and materials for text manipulation.

Anne Noble’s photograph of her daughter’s Ruby’s imaginative spell for attaining invisible flight are a big surprise and a good laugh: a recipe that could almost come out of Macbeth, carefully written out in pencil in a school notebook. The work looks a little like a Marie Shannon, but less sweet and longer, written on several open pages. As a document it seems authentically private as a genuine fantasy, not constructed to be documented.

The two white neon works from Mary-Louise Browne are gorgeous looking with their snappily elegant letter shapes, and clever references to Alexander Pope (just nine short words make up one long line) or popular parlance (three short words), but their self referentiality makes them cling to the media of Kosuth and the syntactical structures of Weiner. Browne’s method of technical presentation here is unwisely derivative, the sixties conceptualist art historical connotations blocking off access to her genuinely witty content.Perhaps she should have left the original Pope quote (and ten low words oft creep in one dull line) intact?

Rose Nolan’s wall paintings (like those recently seen at Te Tuhi) are a lot better than her two free-hanging Hessian banners shown here, dense with oval perforations through which you apply the language. Their mangy reverse sides make you wish they were on a wall, and the declared sentiments of Less Is More or (the opposite) Less Is Over Rated are hardly earth-shattering - despite the humour of the 'subtracting' holes. Nolan is not in form with these clumsy red and white hangings that double as conceptual filters.

Nolan is Australian, as is Mikala Dwyer who presents a long, blue, river-like carpet that spills down the wall and across the floor. It features phrases in coloured felt letters naming parts of the moon, features discovered by Giovanni Batista Riccoli in the seventeenth century. This list has a poetical flavour not necessarily accentuated by the rolled-out carpet format. Dwyer is famous for her formidable powers of invention with ‘non-art’ materials but here her contribution seems decidedly ordinary.

The exhibition’s highlights are three drawings by English artist Fiona Banner, framed drawings of (or studies for) larger wall texts. They come from Banner intially describing the actions of a stripper she hired so she could verbally describe her. Earlier she had also treated a sexually explicit movie as a source for ‘life model’ descriptions. Her studio writing - made in live peformances - is in short staccato-like phrases, bursts of disconnected factually described body parts, strung out in a ribbon of pencilled language. A bit like Robbe-Grillet in its clinical precision.

One Banner drawing has the written planes make up a corner, the others are frontal spatially - one like a tall heap (an allusion to Smithson?), the other a low rectangle laid over another painted over, much fainter, written oblong. The text is printed, not cursive, and quite scratchy and raw.

Denis O’Connor presents a series of slate Chinese inkwells bearing relief-carved images based on literary texts that he loves. These small paperback-sized, framed annotations are visual footnotes that for him are quite small, and simpler than usual. The intimacy works, drawing you in close, plus there is an added sensual bonus of muted, wax-coated colour which has an extraordinary softness.

Banner and O’Connor are worlds apart, but they (and Noble) make this group exhibition a good visit.

Darragh at Two Rooms

Judy Darragh: Studio of exhaustion for diligent service
Two Rooms
3 July - 1 August 2009

The nine works Judy Darragh presents in this show make excellent use of the generous downstairs Two Rooms space: lots of air around each item and a clever division down the middle that lines up two plinths (each half the stud height) to mimic the two central columns.

As a colourist Darragh’s chromatic combinations in her wall and floor works often are too brash, especially with her use of fluoro, or with too many hues. She succeeds therefore when the palette is dead simple. So in this show it is the stained wooden pieces with no applied colour that are the more intriguing – lathed column forms mixed with squelchily glued-on animal carvings, corkscrews, candlesticks and furniture. Between the joins the hokey-pokey toffeelike glue oozes down the sides.

In the middle, two wooden lathed champagne bottles on the white plinths appear pierced by copper bullets. The stands below the ‘wounds’ are splashed with yellow ochre ‘blood’. These trickling marks could also be urine from exuberant hunters. The copious quantities of alcohol they seem to have quaffed could be connected to the hundreds of pinned up, paint-dunked wine corks spread like an angry swam stretched out across the long wall.

Near the wall by the gallery entrance are two stacked up silver painted cabinets crammed with amusingly tawdry goblets, made from plastic bottles and covered with thin silver tape. Like the corks and wooden bottles these pantomime-like props allude to excessive consumption; they are a comment on waste. Yet they have a pathos, a sense of being tragic as well as didactic and funny. Also amusing is a stiffened, brightly coloured Turkish rug, rearing up high off the floor as if it was a Cobra. For a simple idea this unexpected sculptural form has great impact.

Near the opposite corner of the room is a pink banner projecting out from the wall, hung high and attached to an ochre ‘flowing paint’ cut-out canvas. Like the rearing rug, this is very simple, but the two colours combine well with the oddly shaped hanging and shredded looking 'brushmarked' material. So whilst I normally dislike Darragh’s colour combinations, this one turns my knees to jelly. I like the controlled chromatic restraint (contextually the fluoro works), the nutty but mesmerising shapes, their peculiar trickling down associations. It's a strangely lopsided, badly shredded, candy coloured flag seemingly pulled in two directions by competing vectors of gravity. My favourite.