Three artists

: Akiko Diegel, Boris Dornbusch, Trenton Garratt
Starkwhite
3 February – 28 February 2009

This exhibition of three young comparatively unknown sculptors at Starkwhite is a good chance to think about the sensibilities detectable in their work. Two of them have won Awards, so they are starting to attract a following. As ‘a trio’ in the large downstairs space they create a nuggetty, resilient display, and have more work upstairs in stock shows.

Akiko Diegel’s work 7 x 10 refers to a grid of stacked up blankets that have been cut and stitched into shopping bags. They almost could be mistaken for folded singlets but they are too rectangular.

Her installation seems to refer to the comforts of the activity of shopping, rather than being about the acquiring of any specific products. It extols the warm soothing pleasures of consumerism, the addictive joys of spending, seven days a week, ten hours a day. It also critiques by suggesting buyers are like babies with bags that serve as security blankets. That shopping is something compulsively bodily and reflexive.

Three works she has upstairs show a similar sort of wit. One is a small jam jar of bulldog and alligator clips made from the paper foil that surrounds Aspirin and Disprin tablets. It suggests our sense of the corporeal and neural is suspended by chemical painkillers which keep us out of touch with our normal bodily processes.

In a nearby fridge Diegel also shows two frozen power-sockets made not of plastic but white chocolate, a circular joke about sustaining molecular stability through electricity. More oblique conceptually, but astounding physically, is a paper coffee cup holder made of thin plaster – a project similar to works by Glen Hayward in its technical virtuosity.

Trenton Garratt’s sculptures are less complicated, mounds of brittle terracotta or white chips that are thin with pointed ends. The work is about the heap as an elemental haystack-like form, and physical taste. The fragile baked sticks look unnervingly like skinny French fries and affect you intestinally. They also look like straw or shredded paper.

Upstairs he has two unusual oil paintings about vertical – not horizontal – layering. They feature scrawled texts. Out of Change has ‘Africa’ and other words written underneath the title, while Out of Nothing is superimposed over ‘Danger’. Garratt seems inspired by Robert Smithson’s famous A Heap of Language drawing with its stratified lines of cursive script.

Boris Dornbusch’s projects seem fixated on transmitting or receiving signals, a trope for the process of Art itself. His main work, Towers 2 The Sky, features video film of a man in an agitated (drugged?) state, frenetically dancing. He is slapping his buttocks and legs to the rhythm of music that we cannot hear. It may only be in his head, or it may be emitting from his nearby house or various parked cars.

He is filmed from a high window from across the street and that creates a sense of voyeurism. The moving image is projected on the gallery wall from a DVD player on a stand and nearby is a microphone stand with no mic, as if a comment on the unseen musical source.

Dornbusch seems intrigued by the distance between separate parts of artworks. On the wall by the landing of the staircase leading upstairs is a yellow disc from a plate-sized ‘smiley face.’ The two eyes and curved mouth have somehow slipped down to the varnished floor. Upstairs the theme of movement is explored with stationary objects once more. A pilgrim’s bundle wrapped in garish synthetic fabric and attached to a pole lies on the floor of one of the galleries.

There are also two sets of hanging keychains on the walls. One has a laser aerial for locking and unlocking cars. The other a whistle. The theme of transmission and reception appears again.

This is a subtle understated show where nothing is obvious. You need time to ruminate and discover the connections. It’s a tough restrained exhibition that is demanding but rewarding.

(Many thanks to these artists and Starkwhite for the above images. The photo of Trenton Garratt's terracotta Our House was taken earlier at City Art Rooms.)

It is a little over a year since I moved from Hamilton to Auckland

and now there are more than three hundred reviews on this site. Remember you can always look for discussions of artists you like (or dislike) by using 'search' on the top lefthand edge of this page, by rummaging around in 'older posts' on the bottom righthand edge, or by going down the listed months on the righthand margin.

I'm always keen to get other (identifiable) voices alongside my own, expressing (hopefully different) views on shows - in Auckland as well as other cities. In principle I'd like to get a number of writers commenting on same shows - that's always interesting - and more comments too. Any queries, drop me a line at mungo1@xtra.co.nz.

Here is a contribution from Rhondda Bosworth about a New Gallery show.

In Shifting Light
Curated by Ron Brownson
New Gallery
8 October 2008 - 12 April 2009

This stimulating show, using mostly paintings from the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery, explores the concept of landscape as both external and internal. The show’s curator, Ron Brownson asserts “. . . the differences between interior and exterior space affect what we contemplate as landscape.” This curatorial concept is useful because of its potential for inclusiveness. Almost any artwork can be described as a “landscape” in these terms. In Shifting Light gives us an opportunity to see some fine works.

I enjoyed the room containing paintings by Charles Goldie, Petrus van der Velden, James Nairn and Raymond McIntyre. These vintage works, of landscapes in the orthodox sense, were all wonderful paintings that grabbed my attention. My favorites were Charles Goldie’s The story of the Arawa canoe (c 1938) a tiny painting of great beauty executed on a cigar-box lid, Van der velden’s sublime Stormcloud (1907-09) and Raymond McIntyre’s stunning Evening (1905). I have to mention too, the rivetting colour of James Nairn’s Sunset (1903).

McCahon is represented of course, in top form, demonstrating a spirituality that I hope we never take for granted. His iconic works Takaka Night and Day (1948) and A Candle in a dark Room (1947) are most familiar to me as postcards. The latter is simple and modest in form, yet it effortlessly accesses the spiritual self. I couldn’t help comparing its success with Peter Robinson’s visually breathtaking Strategic Plan (1998). Meticulously executed in red, black and white, with a distinctly Maori feel, this large painting could have been so wonderful, but its texts (I could only understand the ones in English), a banal and cynical critique of the chattering classes and the art world, bring this viewer down with a disappointed clunk.

There was a good photography room with works by Daley, Oettli, Morrison, Baigent and Westra, but they are all dwarfed by the power of Ava Seymour’s photo-collages. I must confess there was a time when I couldn’t come to grips with Seymour’s work, but this time they got me round the throat and gave me a good shaking. The works were selected from her series Health, Happiness and Housing (1997) in which beautiful photographs of pastel-coloured state houses are juxtaposed with inhabitants in the grip of horribly visible dementia. Her diptych Exotica (2004) which depicts a sleazy corner of K’ Rd, is a surreal, psychological tour de force.

Other works I appreciated were John Hurrell’s elegantly cryptic Conan’s Head (1989) a large painting in which fragments of maps create an electric psychological energy, and Bill Hammond’s Buller’s Tablecloth (1947) – brilliant, tantalizing, disturbing. I am usually unresponsive to video works, but Mladen Bizumic’s Hauturu doc (with soundtrack Adagio – Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones) 2003blew me away. A lyrically beautiful work of shifting fabric-like forms that create a land/sea scape, accompanied by achingly sad music, it went straight to the heart.

(Above, images by Seymour, McCahon and Bizumic.)

Recent and not so recent cutouts

Richard Killeen: Cutouts 1981 - 2008
Ivan Anthony
4 February - 28 February 2009

In this wonderful little show six cutouts give you the chance to see how Killeen has explored not only different ways of organising ‘narrative’ or ‘literal’ subject matter under various titles, or exploited emotional mood, but also to examine his experiments with scale, number, surface, shape, line and pigment saturation. The clusters of painted, shaped, aluminium components are surprisingly varied.

His emotional content achieves different tones. Dew (1996) is a meditation on death and grieving, in particular the loss of his friend, the artist Gordon Walters. Sunset, Sunrise (2000) is very different. It is celebratory and buoyant, about the pleasures of the sun and its consistent diurnal course, and how we bodily respond to it. Each image is like a syntactical phrase in a sentence.

Other works are more cerebral, and contemplate the mechanics of certain verbs like that of ‘flying’ or ‘punctuating’. Using only three shapes, Three Fliers (2008) makes us ponder the wonders of aerial motion as achieved by insects, aircraft and birds. Punctuation Space makes written language’s structuring marks into three-dimensional forms, chunky solid glyphs that hover in space waiting for sequences of letters to accompany them.

Insect Inside (1997) explores Killeen’s continual obsession with insects, showing us his love of drawing and a whimsical graphic style that is distinctive even in his early Realist paintings. Tools and Instruments (1981) has a delicate brusherly surface imposed on its large jagged shapes. It makes us wonder what kind of tool, what sort of instrument, could create such turbulent, sweepingly expressive marks that contradict the restraining angular contours.

If you ever missed Killeen’s touring survey, Stories We Tell Ourselves, or would like to see some more variations, this is a nice opportunity. It is so different from the digital mages he is currently making.

New comment from Elena on

Yummo retinality.

Waitangi Day on Waiheke

Headland: Sculpture on the gulf
Curated by Jenny Harper, Justin Paton and Helen Kedgley
Waiheke Island
23 January - 15 February 2009

With a title that is lifted from Robert Leonard’s famous 1992 national survey, using a pun linking landscape with intellect, this is an outdoor presentation of 26 sculptures on a meandering hilly track that overlooks some of the beautiful scenery you can imagine. So beautiful in fact, you wonder if there is any point pondering art at all. How can it ever compete?

Well some of it does, but only just – by the proverbial skin of the teeth. Contemporary sculpture has changed in recent years and become more intellectual, about social interaction, less preoccupied with ‘nature’ and besotted with ‘culture’ instead. This millennium’s first decade is quite different from the seventies. This show is pitched at the parents or grandparents of today’s students at art school – unlike say, the One Day Sculpture projects. It is unabashedly old fashioned. It could have been otherwise –with moving images and performances if they had wished. Obviously the organisers and curators didn’t. A shame.

Dated it may be – and very bourgeois (to go with the vineyard visiting) - but there is some interesting work here nonetheless.

Here are ten highlights, sculptures I find unusually memorable.

Two evanescent works that subtly focus on the act of looking and perceptual/spatial processes come from Gill Gatfield and Gaye Jurisich. The former has a vertical plate of thick, tinted glass overlooking the sea with an I-shaped rectangular hole cut in its centre. The latter: parallel horizontal lines of red wire that are suspended across vistas like power lines, and which on reaching the ground, turn into a mysterious archaeological dig or guide lines for seedlings in some bizarre nursery.

The opposite extreme is work I would call ‘cute’, but which has a vaguely serious, powerful presence nonetheless. Lucy Bucknall’s platoon of welded bronze, helmeted meerkats about to ambush users of the path, and posed for action with guns and grenade launchers behind rocks, bushes and mounds of earth – seem more about unusual animals than a satire on military behaviour.

Fletcher Vaughan’s painted aluminium ‘folded paper map’ boat is just as whimsical. It is ‘moored’ slightly behind a tree and you have to look hard into the sea to find it. Easy to see from a distance is Christian Nicholson’s large sculpture of a balsa sheeted, slotted, toy plane thrown by a giant. It has landed near the cliff edge.

Jeff Thomson’s big water tank with portholes is also a lot of fun. Painted blue inside, quirky plastic, metal and feathered items move inside the water-filled cylinder, ascending and falling, and propelled by a solar panel on its roof. Like the military meerkats, a crowd-pleaser.

Some sculptures are particularly well integrated into their sites. Louise Purvis’s serpentine tube of wire-netting stuffed with pine cones is menacingly intertwined with a large pohutukawa tree. Ominous, yet also funny, it is visually fascinating as a continuous linear form, one that critiques an introduced tree-species as ecologically damaging as a parasite.

Paul Cullen’s send up of scientific collecting of data here continues the humour for which he is well known – turning visual conventions and the laws of nature upside down or back to front. His arrangement of metal stands bolted onto concrete slabs bears glass tanks, hosing and copper tubes. It teasingly seems to look out to sea but in fact points to a modernist building set in the grassy slopes behind, with huge glass walls and a geodesic dome. Inspired in its perversity, the half-completed ‘lab’ mocks the natural elements while smirking at this adjacent, domestic but clinical, architecture.

Paul Radford’s tilted dinghy on a mushroom-like stalk, with flaking paint, looks like a massive keeled wooden head by Modigliani. It is sited on a ridge and can be seen for miles. Its simplicity, strangeness and position make it very effective; it is easily the most haunting image in the exhibition.

Another boat form from Pauline Rhodes features a ribbed kayak structure with strips of fluorescently coloured and reflective tape on its struts. Placed inside are piles of black fishing netting, driftwood, seaweed and detritus like old jandals. The harsh intense colour hovers in space in front of the form, as Rhodes’ works are prone to do. She uses chroma to expand the structure, open it up, create vectors and make unexpected linear or planar tensions.

It takes effort, expense, fitness and time to visit a show like this – with its essential ferry trip. It is a mixed bag of artists, but compared to other years the selection seems particularly successful. It’s not cutting edge, but it’s fun all the same. If you can cope with the summer heat, it’s worth it.

(Above, details of works by Paul Cullen and Louise Purvis.)

Reelin' in the years

Tessa Laird: The Rainbow Reels
The Film Archive, Karangahape Rd
6 December – 7 February 2009

I hate television with a vengeance. Haven’t had one in the house for years, simply because I’ve always felt so insulted by – in this country anyway – its consistent mediocrity. Some might call me a ‘snob’ but I think it is sensible to use your time wisely enjoying books, CDs, DVDs and Charlie Rose instead. Oddly, when checking out Tessa Laird’s Film Archive installation of seven spectrally arranged monitors, each with a selection of film based on a specific colour and positioned in a curved formation on the floor like a rainbow, I was startled to experience pangs of nostalgia for the seventies and eighties (their TV news items in particular did it), and got quite rattled. You know… horrible things like dewy eyes and lumps in the throat. She’s got a lot to answer for.

Seven screens for seven colours is a clever idea. Laird explores colour as a trope, as a word in spoken language, and as a physical sensation. The later is not as evident as you might suppose. It is not as immersive as the films of Len Lye or Nova Paul can be, so I was a little disappointed that my retinas were not bombarded with sweet chromatic sensations, though there were some. There was lots of documentary material, coloured and b/w, and many interviews (especially from Sweetwaters Festival), much of it inadvertently funny with its high moral tone (from politicians and police) when addressing the behaviour of youth.

As you’d expect from Laird, the show has a ‘green’ (ie. ecological) and anthropological flavour. It is consistent with the persona she creates with her writing and exhibited artworks. It’s serious and whimsical, with a big interest in social history – but nuanced in its organisation.

Because of the complexities of having seven channels to attend to, it needs at least a couple of visits to concentrate on some of the spoken content. An unusual project that probably hasn’t had the audience it deserves.