Salient » Visual Arts

Spring Cleaning

Jane Wallace — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:00:59 +0000

There is an ache to spring that I feel when I notice the flowers starting to bloom along the Hutt highway. Falling towards the sun. First swim of the season, when it’s not warm enough yet. You get a haircut. Here are some things to fill the afternoons that get longer.
The Future is Death at Toi Pōneke, until 13 October
Taupuruariki Brightwell, Leala Faleseuga, Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, Rex Paget, Janice aka Hy-bee Ikiua Pasi-Taito
curated by Leilani A. Sio
This exhibition considers the fragmenting of connections between tangata whenua and tangata o le moana that have been caused by colonisation. Shifting between different media, this exhibition moves away from a linear temporal perspective. These artists imagine a future for the Pacific that is not structured by a colonial past.
Edit for Equity: Art & Literature at Adam Art Gallery, 13 October, 12-4pm, entry free but registration required
The contributions of women, trans, and non-binary people to Wikipedia account for a minority of entries to the database. Consequently, the information on Wikipedia is largely shaped by male perspectives. This event aims to increase the visibility of people that aren’t cis males who edit or write online entries relating to art and literature in Aotearoa. People of all gender identities and expressions are welcomed.
Body fluids are poetic, not slime but nectar at Window Gallery online, http://windowgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/body-fluids-are-poetic-not-slime-but-nectar

Hana Pera Aoake
Body fluids are poetic is an interactive text, a heartbreak text. Spring is for hanging your washing out in the sun for the first time in months and crying. Produced in response to Georgina Watson’s project Larks in the dawn, Aoake writes about the trauma of colonisation and modes of grief.
Can Tame Anything at The Dowse, until 25 November
Ruth Buchanan, Alicia Frankovich, Mata Aho Collective and Sriwhana Spong
Concepts of body, site, objects, and language thread through this exhibition. The intersections between these things are what I am most interested by. How does language feel? How does the presence of a body in space transform a work? How can we visualise the production of knowledge?
Mother and Daughter on Hiatus at MEANWHILE, opening 5 October
Claudia Edwards
Edwards’ painted friezes explore the tensions that are often present in the relationship between a mother and daughter. Often these arguments are like intense sporting matches, but devoid of a referee, left to reach a bitter or entertaining stalemate. These paintings preserve this rivalry so the viewer can be the final witness in the gallery.

Changing Tides

Jane Wallace — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 22:43:26 +0000

“While the notion of a collective identity centred on Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is reminiscent of a pre-colonial world, it is perhaps also an imagination enabled by a connectedness made possible both through our uptake of new technology and our ability to be mobile again.”
– False Divides, Lana Lopesi
The exhibition text for a temple, a commons, and a cave, curated by Amy Weng at MEANWHILE, is a reminder of this “current critical moment in the South Pacific,” where new means of communication can be used to navigate a reconnection of this region.
Arapeta Ashton and Wai Ching Chan’s video Pātai (2018), has no audio. We see harakeke being gathered. Its threads are separated out in thin wiry strands, then the fibres are rubbed across the shin until they form a rope. It is very long and slender. It is put into a pot of water with a brick, and left overnight, so the earthen pigment can seep in. In the finished object, suspended among other objects, we can understand how one location can host a multitude of different perspectives and approaches to existing in a place. Blessing Machine by Peng Jiang and Thomas Lawley (2018) is a metal structure, like an arcade game, free-standing in the gallery. Visitors are able to type their name in, and a receipt printer that is an internal component of the machine will print out a small docket. The machine is futuristic and exciting. The docket assigns you a Chinese name, accompanied by a short message of blessing from the Chinese gods.
What is in a name? What can names communicate about ourselves and our heritage? They tell us about connections, to land and to people. The changing nature of identity can be stabilised by the certainty of a name, or severed from it if it doesn’t fit right.
When I encounter Blessing Machine, I think of the re-naming that occurs in Aotearoa. The supposed complexity of Asian names for Pākehā means that people of Asian heritage in New Zealand are often asked to choose a English name or word, to be referred to instead of their real name. At my high school, Asian exchange students would be introduced in assembly by their real name, and then their “new” name would be announced. This practice only shows that Pākehā value their own convenience over respecting a significant part of someone else’s identity. In 2015, real estate data was leaked showing that the Labour party used Chinese-looking names as evidence that the housing crisis in Aotearoa was influenced by foreign investment. This sent a clear message to Chinese residents who owned homes that they would automatically be othered by virtue of their name alone.

Barely three years later, Kaoru Kodama has produced Orange Notes (2018). Orange is the colour of bureaucracy in Aotearoa, avoiding any political allegiance. Orange Notes is a 20 minute long audio work, comprised of sections of various institutional culture and heritage documents, including an opinion piece written by the Prime Minister and Labour leader, Jacinda Ardern. The state is willing to accept our dependence on Asia in economic terms, but underplays the cultural contribution of people of Asian heritage in New Zealand. Consequently, their responsibility to culturally support Asian communities is often overlooked in strategic plans. a temple, a commons, and a cave is a changing sea tide.

The isolation myth is over. Aotearoa has never been isolated, we have always been part of an interconnected web of islands and people and water, and these relationships are being strengthened once again.

A Love Song

Jane Wallace — Sun, 16 Sep 2018 21:20:08 +0000

Whenever I have a small wound, maybe a pin prick or a scab that I’ve peeled off too soon, I watch the blood blossom, slightly delayed, out of it. I press on the wound firmly, until the skin around it goes white, then release my finger and enjoy the redness flooding back into my flesh. I like witnessing my body’s processes like this, an enormous collage of pores and veins and follicles. I think about these processes a lot during my encounter with Laura Duffy’s Garden of Purity, open your mouth wide and I will fill it: rawness of clipping nails too far, rubbing crusted tears out of your eyes in the morning, coughing up phlegm and having to swallow it back. Decay, life, organic matter are all important to Garden of Purity.
Garden of Purity is installed in the Courtenay Place lightboxes, but also consists of a series of longer videos online, at gardenofpurity.space, which were hosted at MEANWHILE for one night only. The project is described by MEANWHILE as exploring ideas of Catholicism, abjection, advertising, and queerness, and considering the links between art history and mass media. My laptop is not powerful enough to play the videos properly, but this adds a clunky and distorted layer to the moistness of the imagery. I cannot be a passive viewer, as the limits of technology make me constantly aware of the fact of my viewing. I become conscious of my viewing behaviours, my impatience, my desire for immersion.

The basis of the imagery is from edible material that Duffy has sourced. Think of rituals that involve food, a wafer placed on the tongue, breaking bread. An apple, plucked, bitten. This presentation of edible material does not look like something that can be eaten though, but something that has been.
Consumed, digested. An intimate look at the systems of the body — can you get any closer to someone than when you have seen the inside of them? Someone told me about a man who watched his wife have her organs taken out and put on a surgical tray next to the operating table. True romance. Is the inside of the body sexy? Can it still be sexualised? Can you put a beating heart on a billboard and use it to sell a bikini? Maybe making something absolutely graphic means it can no longer be explicit. Zooming in on sex, on its fluids and frictions makes it more scientific, or maybe more erotic. open your mouth wide and I will fill it conjures sexual innuendo. Open your mouth wide and I will fill it — with a cock, spit, cum, piss. The idea of kinks. Who can say what is deviant? Normal sex/abnormal sex. Advertising tries to convince us that there is a fixed notion of desirability and sexiness, based on heteronormativity. Adam and Eve. Garden of Purity, sanctity and sinless. Blackened, the apple falls. Decay signals life, but decay is also the end of a life. The limpet-like facets of Duffy’s work breathe in and out.

Good Taste

Jane Wallace — Sun, 19 Aug 2018 21:00:24 +0000

In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes that a “novel insistence on good taste in a culture saturated with commercial incentives to lower standards of taste may be puzzling”. Sontag was writing in the context of depicting atrocity, but somehow, the dictate of “good taste” tends to prevail in our society: a video of a kidnapped journalist being executed is removed from a Boston news website, an Urban Outfitters Kent State University sweater is pulled from production.
Good taste is a strange criteria. In many ways, it feels like a performative thing. The notion of good taste shows us as proving our own moral capacity, and also attempts to establish some sort of concrete line of acceptability, where none can ever actually be found.

This idea of good taste teeters on the edge in the newly-opened Iconography of Revolt at City Gallery. Curator Robert Leonard prefaces this with a sort of disclaimer in an interview with Olivia Lacey for the gallery’s website:
“Iconography” means both the visual language used in art works and the study and interpretation of that language. I called the show Iconography of Revolt to emphasise that it isn’t simply about revolt. It’s about the way it’s pictured, about the way images work. I could have called it Picturing Revolt or Rhetoric of Revolt.”
In claiming that the iconography of revolt can be isolated from the contexts and conflicts that inform it, Leonard attempts to neutralise the imagery included in the exhibition. The Pussy Riot protest at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where all members wear balaclavas, set alongside a glass case with a series of balaclavas, is inescapably in dialogue with the Terrorist Teapot sitting in the gift store. The aesthetics employed in each of these scenarios are built of the same iconography. Yet, reducing something that is so recently part of our social conscience into aesthetics means that we are encouraged to feel nothing towards representations of injustice.
We already get it. It is not that the depoliticisation of this material is shocking, but that it is not. We got the joke a long time ago. Leonard is obviously aware of this; a clip from a Maharishi fashion show that appropriated jihadi aesthetics is another empty provocation. It is such a trendy thing to be socially aware, or to capitalise on the political/feminist movements. Fast fashion companies smear “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” across a t-shirt made by exploited women in a faraway country. It is in this zeitgeist that Iconography of Revolt was surely conceived.
The flattening effect of following an international drift is felt in the gallery space. There is an uneasy absence of revolt or resistance in the context of Aotearoa in the show. There is a scattering of New Zealand artists, but none that address content from New Zealand, and not for lack of it. In 2000, City Gallery mounted a show titled Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, in collaboration with the Parihaka Pā Trustees. There could have been an opportunity for Iconography of Revolt to remember this show, to understand the absolute necessity of resistance in this colonised land. Instead, Arwa Alneami, whose Never Never Land occupies an upstairs gallery, and SODA_JERK’s TERROR NULLIUS, playing in the auditorium space, are left to counteract the deadpan stance that Iconography of Revolt cannot shake.
Correction: Death and Desire in Salient Issue 16, was written by Nina Dyer, not myself as it was wrongly attributed to.

Death and Desire

Jane Wallace — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 21:00:16 +0000

What initially seemed to be a rather sensational title for an exhibition about hair proved to be entirely apt: the themes of Death and Desire interlace and tie various items from the Turnbull collections together like a neat braid.
Though hair is not usually included under the “human remains” label, the surprising amount of this bodily material found in the Turnbull collections lends a macabre quality to the historic items on show. This exhibition doesn’t just consist of portraits either—it includes actual locks of hair that belonged to now-deceased folk. Memento mori objects like the Victorian jewellery made of hair — worn to commemorate the dead — are only considered morbid in modern times. Like vanitas paintings that incorporated skulls into still lifes, these objects were once commonplace due to high mortality rates. Death was once so pervasive that carrying the remains of a loved one, whether in a daguerreotype compact (an object similar to a locket) or woven into earrings, was arguably an act of social obligation more than it was sentimental.
When its purpose was not to memorialise the dead, hair functioned as a substitute for subjects of desire. A particularly disturbing case in point is a diary of a settler that includes women’s hair, likely taken as a token of his sexual conquests. The diary dates to 1860-67, and it is suggested that the women were from Ruapuke, an island “where few Pākehā ever went”.
While we can only speculate over the motives for taking their hair — or whether the women consented to having their hair collected in this way — the curator makes a case for the correlation between this instance and colonial ethnographic practices. What this would reveal is not only the disturbing sexual motives of the settler, but the inherently fetishistic interests of more “official” ethnography.
Hair has always been a politicised site upon which intersections of racial, gendered, and class-based identities and oppressions have been enacted and embodied. Artist Sonya Clark makes the incisive point that “hair can measure hegemony within our culture”. It is for this reason that Katherine Mansfield rebelliously cut her locks short—you can see them here. Photographic portraits of wāhine Māori with long shining tresses are comparatively hung next to portraits of tightly coiffured Pākehā women. It is noted that the decision to let their hair down would have been the photographer’s: loose hair on indigenous women was regrettably stereotyped by Europeans to signal availability and lust, a trope that the photographer has played on here.
If you’re not turned away by a phobia of detached hair or an allergy to libraries, this exhibition is worth a visit for its contemporary works in particular. One of Justine Varga’s cameraless photographs, made with hair from the shower, complements Alison Maclean’s short film entitled Kitchen Sink (1989). Taking cues from B-grade thrillers and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929), the film follows a woman torn between lust and horror when she accidentally grows a hairy spouse in the bath (not unlike an expandable water toy). Through a delightfully absurd narrative, this work encapsulates the opposing forces often at play in our relationships to hair.

Free Time

Jane Wallace — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 21:00:49 +0000

Here are some exhibitions and events that I have not seen yet, but that are exciting and intriguing. Use a moment before deadlines to catch a couple of these, and I will follow my own advice and do the same.
Pleasure and vexation— the strata and spectacle of history at Pātaka, until 19 August
Danie Mellor
Danie Mellor’s use of mixed media creates images that resemble something suspended between cyanotype and willow patterning. This exhibition explores the consequences of colonisation on indigenous people in Australia, and stresses the need for continuing dialogue around the troubled coexistence of indigenous and non-indigenous people. These are critical conversations to be having, a reminder that indigenous people are still living with the effects of colonial rule.
Window Dressing at Bartley + Company, until 11 August
Lonnie Hutchinson
You’ve probably seen Lonnie Hutchinson’s work before, those dispersed cut-out-like shapes in the very silent reading room in the library. In this exhibition, she uses the idea of window and curtains to think about what is seen and unseen. Her method is like creating strings of paper dolls, inseparable from each other, but employs Polynesian motifs and mythology to think about what it means to be Polynesian, a woman, and deeply connected to genealogy, place, and history.

Le Sceau de Salomon at The Engine Room, until 3 August
Chloé Quenum
This exhibition is about dual meanings to things. The French title refers to the legend of the Seal of King Solomon, a signet ring that allowed him to control demons — it also refers to the name of a forest flower. These kind of slippages between reality and interpretation, especially when travelling across geographies, are navigated through mixed media and video works. Drawing from the artist’s experiences in Aotearoa, Benin, and Paris, she contemplates the possibility of everything being connected to something else.
Death and Desire— Hair in the Turnbull Collections at National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga, until 7 September
I have always been repulsed by those Victorian mourning bracelets with tiny photographic portraits woven into a wristband of hair, but equally fascinated. Katherine Mansfield’s ponytail is included in this collection, and in many ways, to collect and label hair because of who it was once attached to seems like an act of intense fandom. There is something cult-like about it, placing value on every aspect of someone, rather than just celebrating their work alone. I love this balancing act between beauty and morbidity.

Mata Aho Collective talk at The Dowse, 4 August at 4pm, free entry but booking required
Mata Aho Collective are discussing their work commissioned for The Dowse’s new exhibition Can Tame Anything, on its opening day. The exhibition will look at how 1980s critical theory and installation practices are still influential today. Mata Aho work on a large-scale, and often with unconventional material.
The close-up thumbnail image for their talk looks like some sort of nylon cord, so I am excited about the new work, and to hear them discuss it.

Words Cut Loose

Jane Wallace — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 21:36:05 +0000

Accidentally, between this week and last, this section has become a two-part discussion of No Common Ground. In Ella Sutherland’s current exhibition at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Margins & Satellites, she explores what she calls “a queering of mechanical reproduction”. Sutherland has created a series of silk-screened images that borrow from the typography and design elements of early lesbian publications, produced during the 1970s and 80s. Arranged between them are recognisable sets of eyes, politicians punctuating a timeline of policy that has marginalised the queer body and its visibility.
In hearing Sutherland talk about her work, she articulates a sort of nostalgia for the queer literature and publications of the past. Margins & Satellites retraces the archive to understand what this might mean. The archive is an important space that Sutherland navigates, for two reasons specifically in Aotearoa: the Lesbian and Gay archives (LAGANZ) were formed by the LGBTTIFQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, takatāpui, intersex, fa’afafine, or queer) community as a recognition that their contribution to our society is valuable and rich, and secondly, there are still obvious gaps in the archives, sections which have eluded documentation. The self-made archive is difficult because it always relies on personal foresight as to what will tell the most critical narratives in the future.
At No Common Ground, Sutherland noted that typography histories often focus on the clarity of words. In contrast, Sutherland is looking at words that have been cut loose, words no longer in service, but independently transmitting ideas through their form and arrangement. A meaning does not always have to be legible — sometimes an intentional obfuscation of meaning can convey more complex concepts. The way media is forced into subservience means it is contained within expected mainstream bias. Through confusing the legibility of graphic design, bias can be overwritten, a game of textual subterfuge.

In looking back to the archive, Sutherland makes an aesthetic out of what was once necessity. In early lesbian publications specifically, a number of which Deborah Rundle (another speaker at No Common Ground) was an organising member of, typeface and illustrations were often hand or type written, to allow ease of reproduction and dissemination. The layout, similarly, was restricted by a lack of technology or software, of which we are fluent in now. The resulting aesthetic of these newsletters, as they were often known as, was ephemeral, fugitive, and resourceful. However, Rundle noted that there this was not a deliberate style, but borne out of necessity. It reminds me of Zadie Smith’s “doing more than is necessary with less than you need,” in her essay Feel Free, in reference to the idea of camp. As she noted, the less-than-you-need part is a crucial characteristic; under-resourced-ness leading to innovation. So, even as there was perhaps no intentional aesthete to early lesbian publications, such as Rundle’s Witches, Bitches and Dykes, their hand made nature has come to be an object of nostalgia for contemporary queer publications and imagery. The ephemeral publication, that which has been hastily put together, is for marginalised groups that fail to be recognised by the Xeroxed mainstream. Within Margins & Satellites, this is also manifested in real-time, though the workspace in the middle of the gallery, where visitors can assemble their own collections of queer images and texts from a selection provided to take away with them, another transient document with many variations that will go home and enter a personal archive. Words cut loose are words that continue to hurtle forwards.

No Common Ground

Jane Wallace — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 21:51:41 +0000

Hard to Handle
Feminism is something that is necessarily impossible to isolate from other matrices of power, but also something that can subsume indigenous modes of being, and methods of resistance, into a narrative that is too general, and thus, reductive. With this in mind, I want to think about a common theme that emerged at the recent No Common Ground symposium, co-organised by the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, The Dowse Art Museum, and Enjoy Public Art Gallery— the use of materiality to escape conventional frameworks of interpretation. No Common Ground explored histories of queer practice, mana wahine, and feminist art, so in my discussion of materials, I don’t want to assume that these are aesthetics of feminist art, but acknowledge that these are more widely used to resist institutional narratives.
Something about innovative materiality can make an artwork hard to handle. Whereas media like painting, photography, and traditional sculpture carry the weight of historical connotations with them, new materials can elude this. What does it mean to be hard to handle though? Something that is slippery and challenging. This is the other part of being hard to handle; a perception that the ideas contained within the physical form of an artwork are too difficult for a public audience. Categorising something as “hard to handle” from an institutional standpoint is dangerous, as it is a way of avoiding responsibility for not creating space for narratives that are not normative and Pākehā.
Materiality is mobile, too. Pieces of detritus come together, snaking along a floor, objects that were meant to be ephemeral, made permanent but still somehow in flux, maintaining an ability to be rearranged, to become invisible, and to disperse. In Embodied Knowledges, currently on at The Dowse, Vivian Lynn’s Lamella Lamina (1983) installation combines architectural tracing paper and residue from Lynn’s methods of processing that involved asphalt, water, and oil pigments, and then the murky and translucent cylindrical forms are held by nylon line. The specificity of Lynn’s medium, created for this work, means that it is not confined by expectations. It can slip between states.
So, maybe mobility is the only thing we have. This kind of contingency of materials can also be seen in the work of Mata Aho Collective, who contributed to a panel at No Common Ground. They use Māori textile techniques and collaboration to produce large scale woven works. Kiko Moana, which was presented at Documenta 14, gets its vivid blue colour from tarpaulin, the kind that would be used to cover a car in a garage or for a hāngi pit. The familiarity of blue tarpaulin in Aotearoa, distinctly outside an art space, and its foreign-ness within it, means that Kiko Moana lets its viewers find their own way in.
Embodied Knowledges is on at The Dowse until 28 October.
The earth looks upon us / Ko Papatūānuku te matua o te tangata is on at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi until 23 September.
Margins and Satellites is on at Enjoy Public Art Gallery until 4 August.

Sometimes It’s Too Cold to Go Outside

Jane Wallace — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 00:05:18 +0000

Here are some mostly online things to see this week, because these days are cold lately.

Looking:
William Linscott, Daydreaming and the Death of the Internet, at MEANWHILE (online)
http://meanwhile.gallery/#platform-oligopoly
William Linscott has produced a semi-interactive text for MEANWHILE’s online gallery, meditating on the state of the internet as a place that is democratic and innovative, and how these notions are increasingly fallible. This sort of criticism is essential in order to find ways to protest against the internet’s adulthood as another censored, hegemonic form of media. The url world is not immune from any of the conditions (capitalist, racist, state-monitored etc.) of the real world that created it.
DIRT gallery (online artist-run initiative)
https://dirt.gallery/pages/exhibitions
They always told you at school that things on the internet are immortal. This is cool for an online gallery because it means their exhibitions catalogue is cumulative. DIRT gallery is an exclusively online space, which means that the artists they host have the freedom to be more experimental than a physical gallery space can necessarily allow. The two shows that have been online since this year are Maddy Plimmer’s Click Here, and Louisa Beatty’s Circular Breathing — two very different shows, which show the diversity that this platform can facilitate.

Robbie Handcock, Love You to the Wrist and Back, at Playstation until 9 June
This is the only exhibition on the list that you will have to venture into the real world to see. Robbie Hancock’s paintings exist in a similar world to David Hockney’s, combining homoerotic imagery with utopian colours. Dealing with queer subjectivity and aesthetics, Love You to the Wrist and Back is an intimate and sensual viewing experience, but also considers how these themes fit into wider social frameworks.
Reading:
Lucinda Bennett, To Care and Be Cared For, The Pantograph Punch
http://pantograph-punch.com/post/to-be-cared-for
The thing about creative practices is that it is often assumed that ideas and processes come easily, that they are some sort of lifeblood. Art is just like any other thing though; sometimes you feel burned out and it is hard. It is still work, and it is easier not to do it. In Lucinda Bennett’s essay, she describes why proper valuation and remuneration for the work that artists do is crucial to sustain the fields they are working in, especially when the precariousness associated with working in art affects marginalised groups the most.

ENDLESS LOVE, Blueprint for an ARI, First Draft

http://firstdraft.org.au/exhibitions/writers-program-blueprint-for-an-ari/

Artist-run initiatives can be really good spaces for hosting the work of artists in a context that doesn’t get them to fit an institutionalised narrative. The collective ENDLESS LOVE, consisting of Hana Pera Aoake and Callum Devlin, have compiled this document of essential considerations for an artist-run initiative. There’s also a really extensive directory of past and present artist-run initiatives around Aotearoa.