Art
Ciao, Auckland
by Tessa Laird
Five artists say goodbye to the old.
The Auckland Art Gallery is due to close for lengthy refurbishments, so, as a swansong to the old space, 54321 invites five Auckland artists to make site-specific projects. There is a range of responses to this brief. Seung Yul Oh greets visitors with giant wooden structures that vibrate among oversized ventilation shafts. Candy-coloured and somewhat nautical, Oh’s work has a Willy Wonka feel, in that it references internal organs and institutional workings simultaneously. Like poopy Augustus Gloop stuck in the hot chocolate pipe, these creations are goofy and organic: a cartoon cross-section of the intestines of the institution.
Further in, Lisa Reihana explores a different kind of underbelly – the unspoken history of the region. Her visually simple installation itemises the articles of exchange used in the purchase of Tamaki Makaurau. It’s a heartbreaking line-up: a handful of muskets, smoking pipes and tobacco, all bad habits for good land.
Peter Madden and Andrew McLeod re-arrange the archive, Madden with his usual cut-up technique, this time mixing images from the Gallery News into his National Geographic lexicon. McLeod chooses works from the gallery’s collection to complement a suite of his digital prints, creating a seamless thread of connections between such disparate materi-al as a kowhaiwhai painting by Theo Schoon and a William Blake etching.
But John Reynolds’s Four Walls, Three Layers, Two Marks, One Light is the showstopper. In a large space lit by a single bulb, Reynolds has sprayed in silver paint, directly onto the walls, the names of all the New Zealand artists in the Auckland Art Gallery collection. This who’s who of New Zealand art is in no particular order, and names vary in height, thickness and font. Some titles are present, some aren’t. As you walk, some names languish in the gloom, while others are picked out by the lone bulb. It’s a work that requires slow perambulation, and occasionally my own light-bulb fired, as friends jostled canonical giants, forgotten names and surprises. If you can get over the regional cringe, it’s enormously touching.
Another fantastic use of wall space can be seen at Starkwhite where Los Angeles artist Andy Alexander has created a vinyl “wallpaper” mural depicting a Victorian library complete with fireplace and fabulous chandeliers. Alexander’s aesthetic is a fascinating combination of the high-tech and hard-edged with the organic and decorative, candy-coating complex topics with a cartoonish steam punk style. Mural #1 sports the legend “READ MORE WORK LESS” and indeed, a sculptural component sprouts a dark perspex table-top that houses shelves of rainbow-bound books.
Colour signifies the pivotal importance of play – Mural #1’s pretty pastel stripes are less a homage to Daniel Buren and more a warped revisioning of Disney--land’s haunted house. Alexander’s theme park is genuinely transformative – a small “drawing” (digital print) sitting opposite the large mural pleads with the viewer “WE REALLY HAVE TO RETHINK THIS CAPITALISM THING”. That this work is one of a saleable edition is an irony that’s not lost on the artist, nor are the jewels at the centre of the drawing’s composition. But Alexander’s crystals are glyphs for the “crystalisation of ideas” rather than mere bling. The print, which was created after the US Government’s pathetic response to disaster in New Orleans, begs for a new way of being in the world.
Upstairs, with a very different offering from Los Angeles, expat Joyce Campbell’s LA Botanical is a series of black and white “tintype” photographs of plants. Like Reynolds’s Four Walls, Campbell’s botanical photography offers an exquisite range of play between black and silver. Convolvulus blooms emerge from murky ground and gleam – datura flowers burst and then wither back into the gloom. There are passionflowers, agave and cactus, each tracing a different trajectory on the photographic plate. Somehow, this old-fashioned technique has re-injected these plants with the elegant mystery that is their due. Like Reynolds’s artists, these plants are stars, too.
54321: Auckland Artist Projects, Auckland Art Gallery (until December 17)
MURAL #1, Andy Alexander, Starkwhite, Auckland (until September 2)
LA BOTANICAL, Joyce Campbell, Starkwhite, Auckland
