Art
At the temple of Ralph
by Bridie Lonie
RALPH HOTERE and MARY McFARLANE,
Temple Gallery, Dunedin.
The Temple Gallery's history stamps itself on every exhibition it holds. Originally the Jewish synagogue (it was later a Masonic lodge) it has Star-of-David windows that rise in an Italianate façade. In the room next door to the gallery space is the almost-intact lodge’s inner room, its painted surfaces adaptations of the underlying inscriptions of the original synagogue. The gallery invariably selects works that reference the high arts, the past and a luxurious carnivalesque. Wandering into this environment recently were Ralph Hotere and Mary McFarlane’s twinned exhibitions, with their glittering images spotlit in a dark space – along with uniformed security guards, known from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery but so unfamiliar in private spaces that I thought they were simply on their way home.
Hotere and McFarlane are husband and wife. The exhibitions are quite separate in content and in form, with none of the joint works of the last few years. Hotere’s concerns remain with a politicised and explicitly symbolic universe. They are angry, almost strident, although they are also gnomic and ironic, as always. McFarlane’s interests, cast into relief by this conjunction, are contextualised by Jenny Bornholdt’s poem “Crossrose and Orb”, reproduced on the catalogue and inscribed by McFarlane on domestic mirrors placed in the entrance hall. The poem describes a movement from circumscribed actuality into luminous space. Its images grow from references to the artists’ lives, transformed by Hotere’s ill health.
What to make of Hotere’s three groups of works? They differ from earlier work, in a slight crabbedness of hand, a somewhat less generous use of space. They play with the loaded symbols of colour, politics and religion in a similar way. Three are in narrow, shiny corrugated-iron, with a tall, red-lacquer stripe from base to top, the word “Jerusalem” written at the apex as if hurled like a javelin. The cruciform cast-pewter mountings continue their references to Maori Christian imagery. In smaller metal works, the Star of David is buffed, and sometimes its points are excised and rolled back.
In litho drawings with collaged and inscribed texts, Hotere draws relationships between the Union Jack and the Star of David – a metallic paper form of the flag cut into a star, and placed inside another star; in steel, the star’s points cut into triangular, empty spaces. A red inscription thanks Billy Apple, remembering the era of British Union Jack art and anti-art in the artists’ London days, signalling an ambivalence about the machinery of contemporary art and its market.
Titles include “This is a Double Union Jack” and “This might be a Double Cross Jack”. Sometimes the script is scratchy and perverse, sometimes it doubles letters, and races across words such as “Jerusalem”. Colonialism and empire are questioned, while the word “Jerusalem” delivers its usual but enormously ambiguous payload. These works are small and their texts irritated, sharp, against a soft litho wash of black or blue.
Hotere’s work took up two walls. On the third, McFarlane’s tilted grey-gold mirrors threw ambient light up to the ceiling and back across the room. McFarlane’s interest in the metallurgy of mirrors has led her to denature the silvered surfaces behind the glass so that the mirrors become almost entirely opaque, yet hold and reflect light. Some of these rounded mirrors were squared with quadrants formed by the shapes of walking sticks, their crooks rotating in or out, open or closed. In the series CrossRose, broad crosses of peeled gold rose over softer moss and blue.
In this division of labour between husband and wife, between artist and artist, McFarlane’s was the role of reflection and containment.
