Art
Quicksilver girls
by Tessa Laird
The world of art is generally as chaotic a conglomeration of ideas as the world at large, but occasionally a discernible pattern emerges. Recently, in my travels around Auckland galleries, I was drawn to photographic works by three women of a similar generation that each referenced the form of the crystal in various ways.
Yuk King Tan exhibited in August at the Sue Crockford Gallery under the umbrella title Disorderorder alongside Ani O’Neill. Tan presented a diverse array of works, including performance and video, as well as a return to her most infamous medium – the firework, albeit in a different format (balls to be kicked around the floor). But the work that dominated the show with its arctic gloss was a suite of computer-generated snowflakes called “Overcast”. Pristine on their white grounds, closer inspection revealed each snowflake to be fashioned from figures cut from newspapers. Each flake was dated – a day in human history represented by a random melange including (in no particular order) wounded Iraqis, Janet Jackson’s bare breast and soccer players mid-stride.
Many artists have used the news-paper as a marker of time – Picasso and Braque pasted newsprint directly to canvas in early cubist still lifes, Rauschenberg rubbed iconic images off front pages with methylated spirits onto canvas in the 1960s, and Japanese artist On Kawara has painted the daily date since the 1960s, framing each work with a page of the local journal as verification of authenticity.
Tan’s reductive ensembles from daily papers are repeated ad infinitum with the help of Photoshop. In this way, she extracts order from our daily disorder; the neat pun of “Overcast” referencing both wintry weather and our oversaturated media environment. She makes the banal sublime by comparing the subtle intricacies of our circadian drudge with those of infinitely individual snowflakes.
In August through September, Ava Seymour exhibited a range of works at the Michael Lett Gallery. Like Tan, Seymour explored a variety of mediums, including photomontage, which she is well-known for (this time of a group of punks outside the Auckland Police Station), but also an unusual foray into sculpture: polystyrene heads on speaker cabinets. The work that I found most subtly effective, though, was a group of collages of human bodyparts culled from medical sourcebooks. Seymour has used this imagery in the past, combined with vistas of beaches and figures in latex bodysuits.
In this new series, however, she has simply ripped diagrams of skulls, tongues, eyes, organs and teeth, and arranged them into crystalline forms in the centre of a white ground, like Tan’s snowflakes. The overlapping shards of bone look like broken china in an architectural dig, while torn organs resemble flower petals – one is even called “Camellia”.
As with Tan, I get the sense that an artist has rearranged elements of our human lives to reference broader natural themes – the recurrence of pattern through all life. Seymour’s imagery has always had a dark streak, but in this case, she has morphed the repulsive or even terrifying into a quietly contemplative beauty.
Also August through September, Joyce Campbell took a more direct look at crystals with Deeper Still at Starkwhite. Campbell is best known for growing microbes on sheets of agar and then photographing the products directly onto cibachrome. In this new series, she has grown her own crystals, and employs huge black and white blow-ups of their intricate forms. In one room, two large-format photos tumble from the ceiling and spill out onto the floor, like massive black waterfalls filled with sparkling gems. I almost imagined I was spelunking in the cool blue light of this room. Two other rooms contain more large format prints as well as smaller framed photographs on aluminium-based paper, giving the crystals a metallic sheen that would whet any miner’s appetite.
In one room, Campbell has exchanged crystals for root networks – passionflower vine roots, to be precise. These complex, branching silvery systems emerge from the black murk and snake like rivers, providing a detailed cartography of imaginary places. Or perhaps it is the recesses of the human body, the veins and the arteries, that they map? Like Tan and Seymour, Campbell opens up a space for a rapprochement with nature’s forces, reminding us just how natural we really are.
DISORDERORDER, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland.
Ava Seymour, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland.
DEEPER STILL, Starkwhite, Auckland.
