Five artists at Tim Melville's

Sunblock
Tim Melville Gallery
26 January - 27 February 2010

Tim Melville has organised this group show of Elliot Collins, Annika Roughsey, Linden Simmons, Joyanne Williams and Wayne Youle. There is lots of work by Collins, with two from Simmons (same works as recently seen in Snowwhite), and one each from Youle and the two Australians, Williams and Roughsey.

Simmons’ two delicate and meticulous watercolours are based on newspaper photographs, something I never realised when I last saw them at UNITEC – usually of natural disasters or horrific man-made tragedies. They spot-light the nature of desensitisation – whether of the casual reader perusing the Herald over morning tea at work, or the visitor looking at these works in a gallery, or the artist himself perpetuating it via ‘beauty’ and a visual ‘sensitivity’. One watercolour is based on a photo of an air crash, another of an atomic bomb cloud – perhaps generating the exhibition’s clever title. In other words it speaks of blocking out radiation, or avoiding unpleasant thoughts – as much as escaping the effects of summer sunlight.

The vertical canvas stretchers of the two Aboriginal painters reference ancestral creatures, possibly their body surface-coverings like scales (Williams) or feathers (Roughsey), or even aerial views of landscape and ancestral homelands. William’s painting has a wonderful sensitivity where the thin white brushtip marks let the black background peek through the dry transparent liquid.

Wayne Youle’s small painting is a gorgeous little flat abstraction that has three vertical pharmaceutical capsules lined up in a horizontal row. Their curved ends press gently against the upper and lower edges while their three alternating white halves pulse against the soft pink-gray background. The title, A bitter pill to swallow, seems at odds with the seductive nature of the work, as if it were an epiphany, some newly arrived-at but shocking revelation Youle was quietly pondering. Perhaps an unpleasant truth about the nature of art itself.

The Elliot Collins works are of two types: bisected abstracted landscapes, and texts. The former seem from a distance to be like impeccably smooth Bryce Mardens but when you get closer you realise they are painted on hessian. That coarsely woven material means you think of McCahon (especially with the biggest work that has a wonderful cow-shit green for a sky – a witty reversal), and Fomison and Clairmont. You see the texture under the paint surface as well as the occasional hole. And memories of those seminal artists interfere with your viewing of these painted rectangles that cannot remain formally pure but reek of New Zealand art history.

That interest in narrative is the key to Collins’ sensibility, his love of language as a material being like the paint he often agitates beneath it. He is getting better and better at putting words together in entertaining and sometimes truly moving arrangements.

How about this for spell-bindingly slippery inventiveness:
I was walking along the beach yesterday and saw a man with a dog who was fighting a stick and the whole event fell into a beautiful superlative, in the universal scene. You know. Small, smaller, smallest.

I can read that over and over and not tire of laughing - as the ambiguous/confusing words turn into a movie that pulls back away from the tormented walker and his frisky animal.

What about this one about the sudden simplicity, relief and exultation of newly discovered love:
Here I give thanks that falling in love with strangers is not inappropriate or weird.

These contemplative paintings are interesting with their flipped-back and interwoven mental sequences, and subtly interfering painted backgrounds that vary from churning brushmarks to galaxies of toothbrush-flicked white on black specks.

Collins’ play between mental picturing and viewed text goes well with the tension that Linden Simmons achieves with his seductive watercolour fineness and disturbing sources, or the flipping to and fro of Youle’s pill abstraction, and Williams and Roughsey’s animal surfaces and birds-eye landscapes. Though sometimes Melville hangs different works too closely together on the two main walls of his rather intimate space, this thoughtfully assembled exhibition is quite exceptional.

Artists’ images in descending order: installation of back wall; Simmons; Simmons; installation in main space; Williams; Youle; Collins; Collins.

Mark Amery reports on the big Wayne Youle survey at Pataka

Wayne Youle: 10 Down – A Survey Exhibition
Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures, Porirua
Until 15 November

Rather than establish and then explore an aesthetic, Wayne Youle established a character - an identity and a role - which over the ten years his survey exhibition at Pataka covers, he has continued to play-act out and play up to.

Youle has refused to let any statement become three dimensional – all his works are like signs to be pushed over – as if he were a marksman taking target practice on a cardboard dummy. In Have You Seen This Man? (Why Yes in His Studio) from 2004 as cheap poster he presents rows of bad identikit images of his face with a range of wanted statements: ‘Wanted for being a shit stirrer’, ‘ Wanted for the apparent copying of some other artists fucking style’ ‘Wanted for impersonating a Maori artist’, Wanted for impersonating a Maori’ etc.

In actual fact the only person accusing him of anything is himself – his is a self-referential game using ploys long-used up in their offence value by other artists. A fantail perches on the head of an upended Walters’ koru stick. Tiki are presented in a range of colours as lollipops (are Rangi Kipa’s brightly coloured corian tikis still the rage?), Ricky Swallow’s skulls are also represented as lollipops - brought neatly into touch with the appropriation and collection of preserved Maori heads, mokomokai. Yet Youle’s touch is often as delightful, light and musical as that of the fantail.

Youle’s work is so very noughties (this is the most of-its-time survey show I can recall seeing) – what one can build with the empty husks of what others have left you. His recent eyeball constructions are clever DNA models that suggest the only personal aesthetic he has is one of treating the work of others like lego brick building blocks. Recently he’s extended that by making family crests from assemblages of others’ icons (notably from a constant influence over ten years, Peter Robinson). In a time when familiar objects and icons have been coming at us digitally faster and more repetitively, Youle has been a man to put a spin on it. With a furious Warholian work ethic, he’s our pop artist of the decade.

His aesthetic is slick and thin – like his pop art parent Dick Frizzell he relies on impeccable design technique, and on moving with the speed and wit of the adman: unapologetically and overtly picking over others’ ideas, and spinning them into smart, flat new combinations.

He plays at being the student – imitating, mixing and matching. This survey is a room of bold experiments, with few limits on the media or style he’ll co-opt. One of his favourite motifs (borrowed from another favoured teacher Michael Parekowhai) is the brightly-coloured Cuisenaire rod, used in the Atarangi method of teaching Maori. Like a very smart secondary school art portfolio, he acknowledges others have already broken the ground and that his job is to makes stamps of identity out of the familiar. One particularly throwaway work here is entitled Parekowhai Park, and I couldn’t help muse that if you wanted to design a contemporary New Zealand art themepark (a miniput course perhaps) Youle would be your first port of call.

There’s nothing remotely deep about a Wayne Youle show. In fact he delights in being profoundly shallow – bringing the contemporary into the realm of the popular. It’s all about surface and shadows. About being able to skate quickly across a slick surface to find fresh takes on the familiar and, like Peter Pan’s shadow, connect the man with the freewheeling imaginative playfulness of the boy. Youle fiddles with things and makes toys and emblems of them.

The arrangement of this survey is smart and says a lot about Youle’s practice. The work is numerous and arranged salon-like, swarming across the walls. It’s reminiscent of the cut and paste cornucopia of the internet - Youle’s own intranet. Just as Youle flattens his sources into placemats, this arrangement refuses to give shape or order to his oeuvre. It amounts to a wall of caught, mounted and stuffed trophies of the collector (a crest mounted set of plastic antlers features in one work, a wall of mokomokai in another).

Then again it could also be the photographs on the back wall of the marae, building on one of my favourite of Youle’s works, 12 Shades of Bullshit (featured in Prospect 2004). Here cameo images of Maori and Pakeha are thrown up flattened to blank shadows on the wall, as if from as slide projector, but in varying shades of brown. Like a dozen other works in this show, this piece demonstrates Youle can step outside of himself sometimes and deliver works with more complex resonances. Some of his most successful works are the less self-referential.

Another analogy for the exhibition hang is the tattoo parlour, with Youle the tattooist appropriating designs and grounding them in popular culture. In this way at its heart Youle’s work is about what we wear as badges of identity. Another favourite of his early work (with several featured here) is a series of brightly coloured Miss Maori New Zealand sashes – Miss Kaikohe 1974, Miss Waimangaroa 1955 - laid out like kowhaiwhai and American abstractionists stripes on the wall (or perhaps the fly curtain going into the fish’n’chip shop).

Presenting quantity over quality (there must be 100 works here) feels intrinsically part of Youle’s practice. You could make a show of brilliance out of this free for all, but he’s probably elected not to be edited. The survey constantly cheekily disrupts gallery expectations – acting like a 21st century advertiser in providing pop up messages in unexpected places.

That means there’s plenty of sloppy work here too. The recent large painting Stay Still… Don’t Move is simply stencil art painted up badly large. Other works like the video work Night Crawler goes off in new directions with little strong effect beyond clever craft. Much of Youle’s dalliances with photography I find ineffectual and unoriginal – from the misty ode to his maunga (a rip off of Natalie Robertson) to action figures copulating (perhaps a reference to his birth as a kind of toy action-man artist, knocking out work based on pre-existing models). Cruising the suburban streets, you sense in the past Youle’s been too busy moving onto the next thing to look back.

A school report statement in a recent work suggests Youle also is prepared to own such an approach: “Wayne shows an interest and flair for arts and crafts. His skill with macaroni and glitter is excellent. He has papermaché ability beyond compare’. This is stenciled large on hessian canvas, with a nod in its flat dry wit to Ronnie Van Hout. Yet it has an honest intelligence and wit that continues to tickle me.

A knockout recent solo show at Suite Gallery which is well represented here and which I’ve previously reviewed suggests however he’s been hitting the mark with increasing strength, able to balance different elements and ideas with more accomplishment. It’ll be interesting to see where Youle goes in the next ten years. In that whirl of borrowed imagery and cheap shots there’s a genuine interest in the complexity of truth and what we identify in.

Cohesively brilliant

Wayne Youle: Token
Tim Melville
13 October - 7 November 2009

Wayne Youle now having his fourth solo show at Tim Melville’s. Highly regarded for his domestic-sized, inventive wall sculptures and images, he follows in the footsteps of Peter Robinson with an interest in post-colonial politics that is accompanied by a fierce scrutiny of bicultural assumptions. He likes to challenge both ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’ givens, often using advanced industrial technology that is subcontracted - in a similar manner to some other artists, like say Eddie Clemens.

This seems a particularly focussed Youle exhibition , without the wider range of art forms and content-types he has often shown in the past. Here there are eight works: four are DNA sculptures made of snooker balls, two are of screenprinted paper bag ‘ethnicity’ masks – a photograph and a set of paper bags, one is a horizontal cross of large granite scrabble tokens, and the last is a postcard of a ‘Maori maiden’ evenly perforated with holes. Four sorts of image only.

With a suite of snooker ball sculptures for DNA molecular structures, Youle demonstrates his characteristic wit. In his proposed genetic ball and stick models for Maori and mongrel (‘pure’ and ‘impure’) genes, the Maori structures use only red, black and white spheres – the traditional Maori colour scheme. The humour has unexpected layerings with the snooker balls of the ‘mongrel’ gene incorporating European eyeball ‘iris’ hues and circular airplane decals. The Maori DNAs float like little balloons hovering above their shiny black granite plinths, whereas the Mongrel one has no impeding weight, and is fastened to the wall.

Another work, Token Maori is a horizontal cross of black granite scrabble tokens that look like tombstone markers, and seems a pithy comment on Maori literacy levels, scrabble being linked to higher education. The plane shape is perhaps an aside on social mobility. With the granite being linked to death and weight, for economic ‘flight’ tokenism is perhaps seen as counter-productive.

With the I am what you make me photograph of the artist wearing the two types of paper bag, with their screened-on labels of Maori and Pakeha, Youle is commenting on his own changing mind sets over the course of one day, vacillating between the two community positions, and also referring to the preconceptions of the people he encounters. Some Maori will consider him fair skinned and a Pakeha, while many Pakeha will view him as dark and Maori.

This interest in light and dark continues further in his use of a tourist postcard. It depicts a beautiful young Maori woman in traditional attire seated amongst specimens of native bush. Not only is she radiant (as a drawcard for tourists) but the postcard with its grid of circular perforations, is too. It is float-mounted in front of white backing so that reflected light from behind bounces through the holes, making the image ethereal and dazzling. Youle calls it Star Light – Star Bright.

Token is a shrewd, super tight, multi-layered exhibition that has lots of conceptual links between the different artworks and their materials - teasing out the connotations of light versus dark and light versus heavy, and applying these as metaphor to historical socio-economic circumstance. It’s admirable mix of vitality, cohesion and observant commentary make it one of the best shows on in Auckland.