Optically gently abrasive

Taking a Line
Vavasour Godkin group show
11 September - 18 October 2008

This is a standard group show from Vavasour Godkin with regulars like Hemer, Parkes, Jansen and Thornley making their usual appearances. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. These four really come up with the goods. Hemer and Jansen especially.

Andre Hemer, while instantly identifiable by his yellow/orange palette and masking methodology, keeps changing his painted forms and the shapes of his supports. The tondo here dazzles with its negative canvas vegetation and unfurling ribbons, while the smaller rectangle seems to be making jokes about Clement Greenberg’s favourite painter, Morris Louis, and his vertical stains. If you ever saw a stain in a Hemer painting you’d be needing an opthamologist.

Down the other end of the room is an evanescent pencil dot drawing by Monique Jansen that looks like a screen door or enlarged section of photo-hoarding. It is wonderfully ethereal with its floating unanchored forms, as is a borrowed Agnes Martin drawing of carefully spaced horizontal lines, popped into the show.

Also inserted (but NFS) is one of the best ever Gordon Walters paintings you are ever likely to see. Karaka II (1980) is unusually large for Walters, being particularly muscular in its organisation of pulsing korus, and with their bulbs being especially large. This strident work is pilgrimage material for out-of-town Walters fans.

Miranda Parkes’ billowing painting of vertical pink stripes has a raw red painted across some horizontal crevices, adding an effective counter-structure to the projecting form. It resonates well with the adjacent Geoff Thornley. Flat and long, its horizontal wooden boards have been lathed into stacks of gouged furrows that have then been painted.

Gregory Bennett’s digital animation is on four small LED screens placed on a shelf, showing aerial views of marching soldiers. Some parade in grids, and others are in spiralling rows, all flippantly satirising military precision.

Angela Brennan, Sarah Hughes and Melinda Harper use colour in a more abandoned sense, either within soft lines featuring raggedy or smeared edges (Brennan) or angular forms that are super saturated and abrasively optical (Hughes and Harper).

Overall this show is an odd selection, for its range is too wide. The subtly restrained and gentle works don’t sit well with the eye-poppers. Nevertheless, for the Walters, Hemers and Jansen alone, well worth a trip down High St.

Psychedelic days; Lynchian nights

Hannah and Aaron Beehre 2008
Vavasour Godkin
7 August – 6 September 2008

Hannah and Aaron Beehre are known in the art world for their popular interactive ‘paintings’ where loud noises make shrubs on large plasma screens start to drop their leaves. Excitable children love them, especially in Christchurch Art Gallery.

This Auckland show presents domestic-sized, framed works. The four that are interactive use dark-toned photographs, with night-time images of Hagley Park that are inspired by David Lynch’s TV series ‘Twin Peaks.’ (Slightly different from the film of the same name, also called ‘Fire Walk with Me’, that is not so soapy, much creepier and with a smaller cast.)

The shots of Hagley Park are taken round by Christchurch's Public Hospital, Botanical Gardens and sports playing fields. They have been made into ‘sublimation prints’, where intense dyes are applied to a thin gauzelike synthetic material so the fallen autumn leaves become bright pink. There is no distortion, but there is definitely a ‘trippy’ ambience in the daylight imagery of the non-interactive works. Their shapes have an attractive but discreet flatness, slightly like landscape images from early railway calendars of the twenties.

The interactive night-time ones show forest clearings and brooks where murders, hideous acts of sexual violence and furtive drug deals might occur. Any close proximity of the viewer gets small groups of mauve fireflies circling between the lower branches. Their colour is restrained. You have to look closely.

I think you would tire of the firefly works quickly if you owned them, but the garish sunlit, avenued landscapes, perversely, are more subtle. The strangeness of their chromatic intensity is hard to pin down. Though static, they radiate a sort of delicate sci-fi impressionism and hold your interest.

Recycled stamps

Lianne Edwards: Recollect
Vavasour Godkin
3 July - 2 August 2008

At Vavasour Godkin, Nelson artist Lianne Edwards is having her first solo exhibition, presenting thirteen grids made of parts of dissected used stamps (some over 70 years old) interconnected using slivers of transparent hinges. Most sheets are suspended from the walls using strategically positioned pins. A couple are framed under glass in deep trays.

Edwards is attracted to certain parts (or possibilities of shape) within each stamp’s image. She cuts out many examples and positions them in fragile square or hexagonal formations. She also makes star configurations, wheel patterns, and wonky cross-shaped structures. The removed images can all be the same way up, or top and tails, or with sideways variations. Birds, mammals, ships, aircraft, houses, ancestral symbols: anything can be painstakingly extricated from the original stamps and arranged into these delicate and frail grids.

This sort of labour intensive art raises all sorts of questions. Just because something is time consuming to make or superbly crafted doesn’t mean it is interesting. Yet the converse happens to be true too. Something can be roughly made, even awkwardly thrown together, and the idea still make it work. I think this is because seductive beauty and grating ugliness can become interchangeable when a compelling concept totally intrigues. Something initially repulsive can be mentally transmuted into elegance if propelled by the right idea.

I know. I’ve digressed and done an odd little rant – the reason being there are interesting aspects about these paper grids beyond the artist’s obsessiveness and skill with a scalpel. Their repetition says something about species and types.

Like Warhol’s silkscreened coke bottles of the sixties, each unit is an individual. Some stamp parts have strange watermarks or discolorations. Collectively from a distance they look like coloured lace. And like an animal group on the verge of extinction, these grids are at the mercy of fate - for the smallest draught might dislodge them off the wall. Even when framed under glass they look vulnerable and fleeting, as if in an interim state, a stage of transitory suspension.

Pressing the paper into the light

Lisa Benson: Hold
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
1 May - 24 May 2008

Lisa Benson is well known for making fantastic photographs – sometimes without a camera, though she often makes them with cameras too. She has a penchant for making intriguing images with manipulated light sensitive paper, configurations she tends to call ‘drawings’. To add to the confusion she also happens to put linear pencil marks on paper that represent things. Like snowflakes. There are a couple of those in this show as well.

The cameraless photographs though, dominate - most of those being made in India. The show is called ‘Hold’ because Benson made them by pressing the photographic paper hard up against either vertically slotted glass windows, or else latticed stone screens, set within the walls of the Taj Mahal in Agra.

The ‘window’ ones show a pale horizontal bar where the paper was pushed tightly against the middle pane preventing light from reaching the chemicals. Where it has penetrated the glass, graffiti-scratched tourist names have become dark-lined signatures and doodles in a ghostly sea of watery mid-tones.

For the delicate star and hexagon patterned stone screens, a three-dimensional honey-comb effect appears on the final, digitally coloured paper, coming from light hitting the thick sides of the carved forms – and not passing through at a right-angle. This makes the shapes project outwards in reverse as a strange form of protruding geometrical wall relief seemingly thrust into the sunlight.

Such Taj Mahal works are good but not divinely great – a quality of which Benson is extremely capable. The best cameraless work she has made using digital enlargements of light falling on photographic paper – such as the ‘Sallow’ works of 2005 that looked like underwater ruins - has been large enough to allow the viewer to be drawn into the space. These recent smaller, colourful works though look initially like texture rubbings, until you notice the very odd light accompanied by unusual spatial effects. Somehow they are constricted by their intimate scale and lack of ambition. They are intriguing, but lack grunt. Perhaps Benson will develop them further.

Swarms of little men

Gregory Bennett: Blacknoise
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
27 March -26 April 2008

Blacknoise presents a dark sci-fi fantasy of a world dominated by thousands of digitally created, shavenheaded young males, all athletic, supple and eternally energetic, swarming over public spaces and all they come across - even floating in the ether itself. The handful of women who are shown are on their backs on beds in buildings. The work seems to have satirical intent.

The imagery though is not violent. The figures are often configured in flailing towerlike structures, practicing a form of gymnastics where forms open and shut like flowers. They exercise tirelessly. Only women sleep. The guys keep on moving.

You have to get up close to see these works. From a distance they seem to be like the holistic brush-marks of Mark Tobey. They could almost be maggots, all writhing in a field. Closer still you might think they are scrambling people from the mescaline visions of Henri Michaux. In fact they are like Lilliputian armies created by Pixar studios, stills made in anticipation of some big screened production, with test samples moving on LEDs.

Maybe Bennett should make such a film. The stills have a steely, Escher-like iciness, especially in the architectural drawings. Although incredibly detailed, these might become tiresome. Because all the figures are the same, the interest is in how the plethora of individuals is grouped, how Bennett clusters them. Real time movement however, would really enhance the motion already implied.

Bennet is no colourist for his harsh blacks, greys and reds make the images optically piercing. But as an unusual fantasy the content of his work is intriguing. Hopefully it will lead to something more ambitious.

Reaction Replay

Fast Forward
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
20 November 2007 – 9 February 2008

This group show of thirteen works from nine artists is a good mix of different generations. Geoff Thornley goes back to the seventies and Petar/James gallery, while Andrew Drummond is an important figure in the history of this country’s performance art, especially also of the seventies. Plus there is a John Panting linear ‘suspension’ sculpture as well from that time – a late addition that looks a bit cramped near the wall, but very unusual. (Here is an image from the VG archives.)


The two large Thornley abstractions look better here than they did in his recent Gus Fisher show. They need lots of wall space and the chance to draw you in close when you are ready. Their fascinating synthesis of canvas with board plays with prepositions like ‘above’ or ‘under’ in their interaction. Unlike related artists such as Kelly (shaped canvases) or Mangold (shapes on canvas), with Thornley you examine the bevelled edge of the hardboard contours or cut out holes and think about their planar surfaces and implied spatial twists.




Andrew Drummond presents a suite of four documentary images from his 1978 Ngaraunga Set of performances at the Artists Co-op in Wellington. (I think Ngauranga is the correct spelling, but both are prevalent on the web even though they would be pronounced quite differently.) Drummond has made inkjet images from slides taken of his actions in the spacious co-operative, performances that referred to the demolished Ngauranga freezing works, that spoke of a ‘conversation’ between him and the slaughtered animals. (This example below is not in the show.)


I personally don’t feel comfortable with the Beuysian shamanism here, but they are fascinating images from an ideologically innocent era. In his excellent article on Drummond in Art New Zealand Wystan Curnow talks of the images being artworks in themselves (‘the documentation is not for the record, it is the work’) but times have changed and today’s digital technology forces us to reassess all that. I think the performances have an ontology irrespective of the static photographs or the filmed video Drummond also made, and can’t be replaced by the images.


Speaking of digital technology and video, Gregory Bennett’s two small screens of moving animated figures are interesting. The lefthand LED shows two humanoids (male and female) joined at the lower chest that twist and turn as they enter each other’s torso and pull apart. They are like a cyber version of some of Marina and Ulay Abramovic’s seventies performance works where the two artist-lovers are physically joined by their breathing mouths or hair, and strain to separate before merging together again. The other righthand screen in contrast shows small figures in a circle performing ritualistic dances and creating expanding and contracting, kaleidoscopic configurations.

Back to the abstract paintings in the show, André Hemer’s work is immensely beguiling, with its pool of exactly repeatable splashes, scrawled loops and swirls – each carefully computer cut in its paint-masking process and juxtaposed with an occasional dollop of collage. And carefully controlled so the elements don’t lose their clarity and smother each other.


Matthew Dowman’s large stretchers are related to the work of Seung Yul Oh, but bigger, less intimate and less comic based. They have less allusion, and added graffiti spray - and are reliant on a dominant colour for their mood, making them more conventionally abstract and physical.

Miranda Parkes has three works here. Of these, the most intriguing is the biggest one. Its scale lets her experiment with different grids, daubs and splashes, all mixed up on the one large, crumpled, billowing canvas surface.


The last two works are slightly different from the others. There is a delicate fragility within Lianne Edwards’ grid of used penny postage stamps, for the individual stickers are pinned up like collected insects, and create through repetition a gridded version of Elizabeth Thomson's much larger metal sculptures of insects. These are stamps though and their shadows push them out so they hover in space like a suspended plane.


Monique Jansen’s framed sheet of obsessive rows of very fine pencil lines shimmers optically, and looks as if it has been drawn with a machine. The lines look like regularly undulating strata of hair-thin crêpes, or layers of large peeled off skins in cross-section. Impossible to photograph, they demand close proximity to appreciate.