Bruce Barber // Bruce Barber: Performance Scores // Adam Art Gallery 3 October - 18 December // Curated by Stephen Cleland // instagram.com/upandadamart // Image by Kari Schmidt
CAUTION: AFTER IMAGE MAY CAUSE CONFUSION, WONDERMENT, AND A GENERAL QUESTIONING OF THE REALITY OF THE WORLD AROUND YOU.
Andrew Beck is an Auckland based artist who has exhibited his work in New Zealand as well as Tokyo, Melbourne and Berlin. What began as a study of photography at Massey University of Wellington transformed into an exploration of the creation of photographs without a camera. This may sound like a fool’s errand, but photography has its roots in the method. Early developments in photography by scientist Anna Atkins for example, with the Cyanotype (fig.1) or more famously Lace (fig. 2) by William Henry Fox Talbot, saw the use of photosensitive paper that reacted with light when exposed. Read Lucy Jackson’s Adam Art Gallery Seminar Series: ‘In Absentia: The Politics of Cameraless Photography’ by Geoffrey Batchenfor a more detailed discussion about the medium. What Beck has done is utilised this technique in his rhetoric about the use of space and its interaction with light. His installation in the Adam Art Gallery entitled After Image is part of a larger exhibition The Specious Present, which consists of four artists whose work visually articulates William James concept of the ‘specious present’. It denotes a period of time that is longer than the present moment but that exists between the past and the future.
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When I first saw Beck’s pieces at the exhibition, I was immediately enthralled, intrigued, and a little more than confused. He had created objects of indeterminate origin, undetectable technique and interesting form. To quote the Greek philosopher Socrates – ‘I am wise because I know one thing, that I know nothing’. I was flummoxed. What was obvious however was that Beck was playing off the light and space of the gallery itself. An innate understanding that your experience of a piece such as Linear Split (8 phases) (fig. 3),depended on your understanding of light and corresponding shadows and the way these were cast within the gallery space was obvious. Beck achieves through his work a sense of spatial awareness both in the viewer but also of the objects themselves. Shadow Strips Cascade (fig. 4) for example is a site specific piece that relies on the strip of light contributed by the architecture of the gallery itself, each photogram is made to look like a reaction to the piece directly before it. To create these Beck would place a piece of paper overtop of another light sensitive piece and with exposure to light would cause the white silhouette to remain. This to me is the epitome of the ‘specious present’ by which the cascade represents a continuous reaction to the light of the gallery space that means the artwork remains in a constant state of stasis.
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Beck’s artwork itself exists in an in-between, and is a play on the duality of being, in that it becomes both photograph and painting, object and shadow, natural and manmade. As I stood in front of his work Linear Split (8 phases) my friend pointed out to me that she couldn’t decide whether the shadows projected by the glass were painted on or were in fact real shadows cast by the installation. We proceeded to spend a further ten minutes inspecting the shadows and still coming to no conclusion. Beck’s body of work intentionally plays on the exhibition space itself, causing you to question the validity of the term ‘unusable space’, what is gallery and what is installation, what is real and what is manufactured. An exhibition of Beck’s at the Galerie Luis Campaña utilised paint to create Invariant Shadow (fig. 5)which saw an abstraction of the idea of the realistic shadows that have previously plagued his work, to develop into a question surrounding the credibility of the work itself. The space, previously written-off as unusable in a gallery context, is transformed into a work of art through manipulation of our understanding of light sources, cast shadows and gallery space.
Fig. 5
Some of Beck’s earlier works betray the scientific facet of the medium’s ancestry. 11.35-11.55am (light drawing) (fig. 6),required knowledge of light patterns in situ at the Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington. The abstract sundial (fig. 7) in the open window at the Govett-Brewster in New Plymouth was also time and light reliant, and echoes the use of the cyanotype by Atkins for documentary purposes rather than artistic. This piece represents a specific time of day that Beck has transformed into a continuous moment, the shadow of which is painted in black as cast by a metal rod. The metal rod embodies the ubiquitous nature of objects, by which the rod is industrial but has now been transformed into ornamental. These earlier works stand to show the development of Beck’s work from studying sources of light in relation to time, to involving space and creating philosophical, abstract objects of modernity.
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When filtered through the medium of photography again, Beck’s images transform to inhibit another dimension. A dimension that is becoming more prevalent in a world of technology and social media, and the availability of that technology which encourages the institution of the snapshot photograph. The reflective surfaces of such intriguing photograms invite the viewer to use their own cameras to capture an image of the pieces such as Descending Platforms (fig. 8). The resulting photograph involves the viewer, who has thus been transformed into the object, as a representation of themselves is merged with the image of Beck’s. The viewer now also occupies the space of the image, meaning that in a way the viewer has come full circle in not just observing visual representations of the specious present, but becoming a part of it.
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Saturday 17 October 2015
Tenderness Is Not A Weakness // 2-10th October, 2015 // Annalise Enoka // In Good Company // Image by Field Skjellerup (https://instagram.com/upandadamart/)
Check out this event today - 2pm at the Adam Art Gallery!
"Join us for the second of two sessions in which Victoria University of Wellington Art History Honours students talk about the exhibition they've curated, Traces of the Wake: The Etching Revival in Britain and Beyond.
All welcome, free entry."
Fig 1. François Bonvin, Engraver, lamp effect (Graveur, effet de lampe), 1861, Etching on vellum, Private collection
A few months ago galleries around Wellington held an Art Night – an evening of late night art viewing, music, and food, with free buses travelling in between the City Gallery, Te Papa, The Dowse, Pataka, and Expressions. Utilising the opportunity to take a return bus for free (I would go to a lot more places if the transport was free), a friend and I visited the new exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum, Seraphine Pick’s ‘White Noise’. Following a tour by the artist through her largest exhibition since a survey of her work in 2009, we got a glimpse of her working process. White Noise is a collection of her work spanning from the 90’s to her most recent works.
Fig 1. Installation view of ‘White Noise’, dowse.org.nz (Photographer: John Lake)
Seraphine Pick is a bit of a big name in the New Zealand art world – a lot of people may know her work from high school. After completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 1988 she went on to be awarded the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation award, the Rita Angus Cottage residency, as well as a Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. Her work straddles the world of dreams and reality. Currently, Pick told us, she has been googling images of people and placing them in an ethereal landscape, often searching for poses, and building her concepts around this. The images she chose were based entirely on whether or not she liked them aesthetically, if they seemed right for what she was imagining. In one of her 2015 works she used a found image of the costumed public attending the infamous/famous sevens. With a devil-horned woman on someone else’s shoulders, she makes a relatively harmless image unsettling and sinister. The piece is quite large and quite confronting, when you see it in person.
In style, Pick’s work could be related to that of Surrealism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism. It is ethereal, and surreal, and not quite what you would see in your day to day life. It is less about accurately depicting a scene than it is about creating a new scene which holds more meaning, and more emotional impact. This exhibition definitely holds true to these themes, with the title piece ‘White Noise’ an image of a musician seated in a blue, green, and gold landscape with a horse behind him.
Pick’s style comes through in all of the works in the exhibition, creating a harmonious flow as you walk through. Themes are separated into rooms, with her crowds grouped together and separated from the 1960’s flower child paintings. This exhibition also shows a great little series of paintings which are hard not to love – ‘Wankered Again’. In this Pick searched for people lying down, and found a plethora of drunks asleep. Painted in her dreamlike way, the drunk people still look exactly as you would expect, tinged with a bit of humour – after all, we all know those people.
Fig 3. Installation view of ‘White Noise’, dowse.org.nz (Photographer: John Lake)
The exhibition is open until the 17th of January 2016 so there is plenty of time to go out - bring your mum, your brother, and your great aunt Janice, there is plenty to see. Plus, it is a free exhibition (as the Dowse’s exhibitions always are) so there is no reason not to go and enjoy it. I would definitely recommend the exhibition if you are a casual art-goer as it is easy viewing art in many ways. But even for the more seasoned gallery goer this exhibition is enjoyable, and Pick’s new work is certainly exciting and well worth the trip.
David Maskill is giving a talk today (8th October, 2015) at the Adam Art Gallery. Check out the Facebook link here. "In this talk, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington David Maskill looks at how Te Papa’s collections have come to be so rich in British prints from The Etching Revival. In particular, Maskill examines the roles of the Wellington collector, Sir John Ilott (1884-1973), and the London dealer Harold Wright (1885-1961) in the formation of the collection.
Art History in Practice is a regular series of seminars showcasing the ‘work’ of art history in which established and emerging art historians working inside and outside the academy present on their current and recent research."
Image 1. Frank Brangwyn, (Belgian/British 1867-1956), The Pont Neuf, 1916, Etching, drypoint and aquatint, 557 x 760mm, Private Collection
