Vincent Ward: Breath – The Fleeting Intensity of Life review

Openly autobiographical expressionism and sublime romanticism are the keynotes of film-maker Vincent Ward’s exhibition of video, photography and painting.

Vincent Ward, working on a painting in his studio.

New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is a safe haven for our most uncompromising contemporary artists – a place where seriously ambitious and conceptual work can unfurl freely. So it’s a little surprising its summer programme is dedicated to someone without many art world credentials: film-maker Vincent Ward. Breath: The Fleeting Intensity of Life is even more of a punt because it isn’t about Ward’s films – at least not explicitly.

It’s a straight-up art exhibition. And in many ways it’s exactly what you’d expect a Vincent Ward exhibition to be: a series of intense, often stunning visual moments that aim for your gut first and your heart second, with your head somewhere further down the list.

But this is also what makes it a tricky show to review: its openly autobiographical expressionism and sublime romanticism fly in the face of cooler contemporary art trends. Ward’s multi-screen cinematic installation Voyage I – Waystation: When I Was 13 I Almost Drowned … and Voyage II – Ardent Spirit is a case in point. In it, he pulls out all the cinematic stops, with moody imagery and a room-swirling soundtrack that smashes the bounds of ordinary 5.1.

The dominant image is unashamedly Wardian: a beautiful young woman, naked and underwater, is tangled in a transparent membrane. Her struggle to escape is spliced with sequences from Ward’s films: Toss running downhill just after her father has fallen to his death (Vigil); Samantha Morton’s submerged face (River Queen); a huge man prone on a small-town road, approached by a horse (Rain of the Children); and a painted bird that swoops across the screens, brought to life with the “motion painting” technique that earned Ward an Oscar (What Dreams May Come).

It’s totally baroque in its conception. There’s plenty of ego on display, too, but thankfully it’s an ego with a purpose. The installation brings to the surface those transformative physical moments – falling, flying, f—ing, tunnelling, drowning – that define Ward as a film-maker. It also reminds us just how tight his visual vocabulary is: birds, hooded figures, animals, women and water appear here, just as they do in his films, over and over again.

The common link between them all is vulnerability – a power play between Ward and his subjects. But as Rhana Devenport – the show’s curator – points out in the accompanying publication, Ward also “exposes himself through these works; this exposure is an effort towards closeness, towards a psychological intimacy”. The personal trauma captured by the work’s title is an essential piece of information not just to this piece but to understanding his filmic work; and as with his films, whether you like what you’re seeing or not, there’s never any doubt that he’s living every frame.

The exhibition also includes five lush photographs from the same shoot, which have an even more asphyxiated drama than the video. But the larger portion of the gallery is given over to paintings: long, thin canvases with birds and people twisting and falling through them, lining the walls like shafts of black light.

Detail from Born in a Caul (photograph)

In his catalogue essay, long-time Ward collaborator Louis Nowra mentions 19th-century romantics William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich and John Martin, whose influence on Ward is strong – probably too strong in places. For Ward, the paintings occupy a central place within the exhibition, but I’m not so sure. Whereas the video installation and the photographs dance delicately between filmic and contemporary art frameworks, the paintings get precipitously close to the far end of that spectrum, where Ward’s footing is less secure.

My discomfort with them also stems from the fact Ward so clearly thinks like a painter; everything he does is infected with an understanding of the complex relationships between process, material, theatricality and physicality. I’m just not convinced paint is his best medium for expressing it: his video and photographic works are just as painterly, but arguably far more successful.

The Govett-Brewster’s location is also an important factor here. Ward’s connection with the central North Island, from Tuhoe country in the east through to the Taranaki and Whanganui regions in the west, is one of the major forces in his career, as are his relationships with various iwi. Kaumatua from across the North Island travelled to New Plymouth for the exhibition’s opening-day blessing, with Tuhoe particularly strongly represented.

Tuhoe’s fusion of Christianity and self-determination has long been a subject of fascination – and often frustration to the point of violence – for Pakeha. Alongside Colin McCahon and Judith Binney, Ward is one of the few Pakeha figures who have managed to harness Tuhoe history and highlight its immense cultural significance for New Zealand/Aotearoa as a whole. Tuhoe’s presence at the gallery confirmed that the respect is mutual, and close.

This may seem a digression, given that there is no obvious Tuhoe content in the exhibition, and very little that could even place the work in a New Zealand context. There is, however, an essential New Zealand-ness in everything Ward does; a quality he draws from his relationships with Maori and the land, and one that, in my view, makes him – when he’s on-form – a virtuosic postcolonial image-maker.

Just like McCahon and Binney, Ward has never shied away from the truth: he digs and digs until he gets somewhere other film-makers and artists don’t often visit: a psychic space where violence, memory, myth, sex and religion mingle in a landscape scarred by its history.

Breath is suffused with that same energy. It presents a man marked by his past: a major creative figure whose visual language is rooted in memory, trauma and a darkly physical relationship with the world. It’s powerful in places, confusing and occasionally inconsistent in others. As a result, it’s not a complete success as an art exhibition. But just like his films, there is something perplexingly significant about it. It’s a show caught between worlds – which is exactly where Ward has always been at his best.

VINCENT WARD: BREATH – THE FLEETING INTENSITY OF LIFE,  Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, until February 26.