Exhibitions
Christchurch
T .L. RODNEY WILSON
Christchurch this last while has witnessed a lot more activity than was the case prior to the last issue going to press. To begin with, the passing of the Labyrinth Gallery, which provided sterling service for young artists, must regretfully be recorded. And a new entry upon the Christchurch gallery scene is The Photographers Gallery at the Artists' Quarter, which opened with a show of recent polaroids by L.N. Shustak.
The Labyrinth's passing ironically took place at the time that both the C.S.A. and Brooke/Gifford Galleries mounted exhibitions devoted to young artists. These two shows, which promised to be in some sort of conflict, turned out to be mutually supportive in a curious way. The C.S.A. show, conceived as one of the C.S.A.'s periodic spectaculars, proved to be unexciting and unprovocative in painting but strong in sculpture - thanks largely to Neil Dawson, Stephen Clark, Bing Dawe, and with his eminently successful multiple Fluid Maze, Derek Ball.
Although two of the painters were represented in both shows the Brooke/Gifford Gallery's New Work painting exhibition went some of the way to retrieving the situation for the painters. The fact that the painting here formed a more cohesive whole was probably in no small part due to all four exhibitors having been honours condidates at the School of Fine Arts during 1975.
Pauline Trengrove's clean, refined, very much Diebenkornish landscapes all entitled Land, represent an advance upon her work last year. She has a fine sense of painterly understatement, of tone and of composition, even if her sources are still somewhat undigested. The other noteworthy works of that show were Jacqueline Dunlop's Rorschach-test-reminiscent abstract compositions painted with earth-coloured dilute paint stained into her canvas in symmetrical and assymetrical biomorphic flowing forms. Her technique, exploiting controlled accident and 'large' paint application, recalls Gretchen Albrecht: but the results could hardly be more different. Albrecht's joyous imagery evokes our skies, seas, lakes and land-forms, but Dunlop probes our inner unconscious self in an, at times uneasy fashion.
Clark and Dawson are both no strangers to Christchurch. For Clark's aluminium rods of last year have been substituted machined timber. River stones have replaced cast lead weights: but the tension and precarious balance remain. His large untitled piece exploited fine, gravity defying, balance and the denial of mass and weight as its skeletal form extended out to define the rigid space of the gallery which it filled.
Dawson's assemblage of wood, glass, concrete housing piles, acrylic sheet and electric light, with its play of rational against irrational, machined surfaces and materials of brittle precision against charred wood and old paint pots, weight and mass against lightness and light, hungrily explored the space it occupied. Bent feathers maintained permanent tension along cords crossing the piece, binding the structure into a tight-knit whole and supporting various of its components.
Dawe's architectural construction, with its lush tactile naked wooden surfaces, reminiscent of Dawson's pieces of the last twelve months, but also recalling Louise Nevelson, lacked Dawson's rich play of materials and tensions, and his animation of space.
Some half decade after world attention focused upon the multiple phenomenon, Derek Ball produced what must be one of New Zealand's most successful examples. His simple but superbly effective Fluid Maze, a sandwich of plexiglass containing red and blue fluid and a series of 'de Stijlish' baffles, becomes an intriguing kinetic colour performance as globules of red descend through the blue encountering the baffles on their slow descent to the bottom.
Shortly after the C.S.A. exhibition, Jeff Marsden, an Ilam honours sculpture student, showed in an ad hoc gallery his final submission. Marsden turned his chore of art school boilerman into an unexpected bonus when he began to extract, phoenix-like, his sculpture from the self-same furnaces which subsidized his income.
Other notable events of the last while include Julia Morrison's first one woman show at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery. Morrison, an Ilam honours graduate from 1975, presented an immaculate collection of paintings, drawings and etchings. Her presentation, like her: execution, her surfaces and paint application, was quite flawless - but at the same time something was missing. It was just a little too perfect and had strayed over that nebulous line separating formal abstraction from sophisticated decoration.
In some of the works, with their rich muted colourings on a black field, there was also a pronounced Art Deco feeling, confirming the essentially decorative nature of Morrison's recent work. Be that as it may, it was an exceedingly accomplished performance for a young painter assembling her first exhibition, and the consistency with which she applies herself to her chosen range of forms and pictorial problems singles her out as a painter whose future development is likely to command our continued attention.
At the outset it was noted that this final quarter of 1976 has been noteworthy for the prominence with which the younger artists have featured. Consistent with this, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery is currently showing a collection of fifty four paintings, drawings and etchings by Grahame Sydney, a realist of quite remarkable skill and sensitivity. With his slow, meticulous technique Sydney's production is necessarily small: this exhibition therefore includes virtually his entire production since his return to New Zealand in May 1974. Certainly it must be one of the most satisfying shows seen here recently. With its wide appeal, both to admirers of the avant garde as well as a public of more conservative tastes, one is left with the feeling that if the growing schism separating artist and public is ever to be bridged, it may well be through a form of Realism, frank and honest in its intentions but still capable of providing the viewer with the richness and depth necessary if a painting is to retain a lasting value.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 3 December/January 1976-77