Third Person
Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch NZ
In filmmaking, the third person perspective refers to a focus outside the current dialogue and an openness to elements beyond the stage or set. In language, the third person pronoun refers to characters and content not present, and brings gender (and gender neutrality) into play. The Latin 'persona' means mask.
In minimalist abstract form, Third Person enters the discourse of identity, with its emphasis on heroes, prophets and activism, and addresses a provincial blind spot centred on McCahon's biblical 'I Am'. The Maquettes in glass and masonry bear the titles of global cultural iconoclasts and line up like backing vocalists to the freestanding large glass, Untitled, and the wall-hung Je suis.
In competing qualities of materiality and ephemerality, these singular and layered forms interact across the gallery space, engaging the viewer and architecture. Presenting and dissolving boundaries between object and subject, Third Person looks for the transformative potential within identity.
Shapeshifter
The New Dowse, Lower Hutt NZ
NZ International Arts Festival 2010 Wellington NZ
In classical collonade form and parallel proportions, the sculptures Babel and Portia conduct a one-word, one-number, one-sound dialogue - in duplicate. Changing weather, swaying trees, spectators and other sculptures surface then disappear from the planes of the works. With equal yet opposing values of light and dark/substance and absence, Portia and Babel ultimately focus on one another, taking turns to interrogate, frame, and delete the other.
Exhibition 2010
Kaipara Coast Sculpture Gardens NZ
Nov 2009-Nov 2010
Rising out of undulating coastal land, Babel centers the subjective in the landscape. The 'glass I' initially strikes a singular heroic pose adopting the icons and idiom that have shaped a cultural psyche, from John Mulgan's Man Alone (1939) to Colin McCahon's Victory Over Death II (1960). Cast as a contemporary Tower of Babel, where humility and vanity collide, the muscular form reveals a hesitant grip on the text. Fluid and reflexive qualities insert a pause in the otherwise subjective roar.
En Plein Air
COCA Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch NZ
The exhibition's title, from the C19th French term 'in the open air', describes the practice of painting outdoors under natural light. This innovation changed the essence of landscape painting, enabling a direct connection between reality and its representation. In an art-historical twist, En Plein Air brings the outside inside to make paintings of live grass and magnetic fields within the confines of the gallery, 'remaking' key paintings made en plein air by modernist NZ painters seeking to represent an abstract landscape.
Suspended Sentence
Physics Room Kiosk, Christchurch NZ
Hooked to the electricity mains and suspended inside a steel sentry box, a barbed 'I' pulsates in a central city square. In daylight, the text is a slender line drawing, a subtle refrain to the noise and constant passage of city workers. As night falls and the quietened square becomes the domain of streetkids, skaters and nightworkers, the text beats bright and insistent. Incomplete and open to each viewer's reading of 'I', the work engineers a collective body of unique multiples.
Current Work
City Art Rooms, Auckland NZ
Rethinking the constraints of the banal 'new work' or 'recent work', Current Work develops a mise en scene in a suite of works 'still in the making'. Deadline, an 800volt electric current piercing the two galleries, suggests visitors should take care but also requires they genuflect before the large glass text I AM / MAI in one space and the registration plate, QR8, in another. Placeholders for characters in a production, the texts embody and critique the place of author, artist, curator, viewer and gallery in a landscape of concrete art, magnetic and lawn painting.
Performance Painting
Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin NZ
Dunedin Performance Art Series 2008
Where performance art usually centres on the artist in the act of making or on mechanical and digital devices, Performance Painting continues to develop independently. During an underground exhibition, the art objects relied on internal energy systems and attendance by gallery visitors. Prick hovered and shimmered in the spotlight while Lawn (Otago) grew upwards, seeking light in the dark.
BeingMade
City Art Rooms, Auckland NZ
Proposing a departure from Duchamp's readymades, the Being-made shifts internally in pivotal ways, evolving and inhabiting a permanent state of flux. Transforming mass produced and natural media (turf-grass, float glass, mirror, bird feathers) into permanent performative art, the beingmade activates a direct relationship between artwork, environment, viewer, gallery, and collector.
Beingmade n. 1. a work in progress 2. an object or idea permanently in production 3. an image in flux through materials, context and open authorship 4. a work of art able to manifest in multiple, unique versions. (Definition: Gill Gatfield, 2007)
Canvas
Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland NZ
'Off the Wall', a fundraising event and final show at the old Auckland Art Gallery prior to redevelopment, provided a context for Canvas, a 12 sq m disposable nappy weave. Through media, form and context, the work explores the notion of 'support' - for the gallery and by the gallery. Literally a support for painting, Canvas stretches over and covers the wall, simultaneously soft and taut. The ambiguous open nature of the work is carried also in the verb: 'canvas' - to sample, enquire and explore.
National Contemporary Art Award
Waikato Museum and Art Gallery
Before installation of Lawn (Greener on the Other Side) in the NCAA exhibition, the Waikato Museum requested the work was doused with pesticide - effectively killing it, to prevent insects migrating and invading important historic works. With the assurance that worms and grass insects prefer a warm ecosystem over a dry alternative, Lawn was hung alive in the exhibition, along with gallery pheromone devices for the 10 week show. Trimmed and watered daily by gallery staff following a schedule of instructions, the grass grew upwards and went dormant inside the cool dark gallery. In subsequent years the rules of entry for the National Contemporary Art Award specifically excluded living art.
Kaitiaki
Te Tuhi/Manukau Public Art Gallery, NZ
A monochromatic 30 sq metre grid of crisp white disposable nappies stretch in one continuous plane from gallery entrance to curator office door. Central to Maori collective land ownership and a cornerstone of the Treaty of Waitangi, 'kaitiaki' also refers to the management and care of public art/taonga and to the collective care of small children. A disposable work made of profane material, Kaitiaki appeals and repels.
In/Out
University of Auckland, Auckland NZ
MFA(Hons) Exhibition, Mount Street Studios Rooftop
Enveloped by high rise construction on all sides, works in natural and manmade media abstract and address the edges of inside and out. Walls operate as windows and glazing becomes substrate. Viewers and space are punctuated and refilled. Feather discs fill circular cutouts in square mirrors. Male and female symbols and forms interchange. Exit and entry points are framed.