News + views from Bartley + Company Art
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The gallery will open 31st January 2012 with our ‘Three Jewelers’ exhibition featuring Lisa Walker, Areta Wilkinson & Sofia Tekela-Smith.
Have a safe and relaxing holiday season from Bartley + Company Art.
Congratulations to Andre Hemer, Peata Larkin and Marie Le Lievre who are finalists in this years Wallace Art Awards. They have all been selected to take part in the travelling exhibition now showing at the Dowse until 4th December.
Andre Hemer, 2011
Peata Larkin, 2011, Pulse_2011, acrylic on mixed media on light box, 1250 x 1250 mm
Marie Le Lievre, 2011, Moving Targets, oil on canvas, 1000 x 1800 mm
As the Rugby World Cup kicks off throughout the country, Rachael Rakena has launched a major new public artwork in Dunedin examining the sexualisation and commodification of Maori sportsmen and the representation of their masculinity and culture in the media.
Haka Peepshow repositions the ‘rugby’ haka within a broader cultural context by showcasing a range of other haka exponents.
Haka Peepshow is presented in a viewing booth in the form of a ‘pou’. A pou is a post, upright, support, pole, pillar, or goalpost, but it can also reference a teacher or expert. The Haka Peepshow pou also references the shape of the black ‘Rexona for Men’ aerosol deodorant – a product endorsed by the All Blacks. Five meters high with a diameter of 1.2metres, the high-gloss black pou has four ‘peepholes’ to enable viewers to look at four different haka performed by leading exponents. Viewers must insert a coin to activate the video.
The 2011 Rugby World Cup is the first sporting event to be videoed and broadcast live in 3D. 3D technology has only become available to the consumer market in the past year and is still at the forefront of media technology. In line with this, the four haka have been recorded in high definition 3D video. The peepholes contain 3D glasses to enhance the illusion of depth and the video has been edited to show each haka in its entirety with sections slowed down to reference the ‘slow motion replay’ as seen on TV sports coverage.
Ko Uhia Mai
A related work draws attention to gender issues in rugby and celebrates the success of the New Zealand Women’s Rugby team, the Black Ferns, who are current Women’s Rugby World Cup champions. Ko Uhia Mai which translates as let it be known draws attention to how little is known about the success of New Zealand women’s rugby. The six minute long video, featuring six current players from the Black Ferns is a large scale projection, showing until September 18 on the side of a prominent building in central Invercargill as part of the Taste of Southland Festival.
Both works have been sponsored primarily by Ngai Tahu. More information and detailed credits can be found at www.hakapeepshow.co.nz
As mentioned in our previous post, Andre Hemer has won the Bold Horizon Contemporary Art Award 2011 with his painting Blue Poles (pictured below).
Judge John Hurrell said “The winning work by Andre Hemer is a painting that doubles as an iPhone QR code, linking to a Google map showing where Jackson Pollock’s famous Blue Poles (1952) is located in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. This American painting was purchased by the Whitlam Government in 1973 for $2 million. Possibly the most important twentieth century artwork in the Southern Hemisphere, Pollock’s work is referenced by Hemer to speak of cultural capital and national status globally, and the aspirations of a New Zealand artist looking at it from afar.”
Hemer’s work will be displayed at the Waikato Museum until 6 November 2011.
Andre has won the Bold Horizon National Contemporary Art Award 2011 with his painting Blue Poles. The painting references the famous US painter Jackson Pollock’s 1952 work in National Gallery of Australia.
Hemer’s painting includes a QR (quick response) code which, when scanned by an iPhone or barcode scanner, will provide visitors with a hyperlink locating the Pollock’s painting. (We will upload an image shortly.)
Andre has been living in Sydney since loosing his studio in the Christchurch earthquake. It’s been an exciting week for the artist. A newly commissioned wall work, ‘Screensaver’ (pictured below) was unveiled in the foyer of the South British Building in Shortland Street in Auckland. Art consultant Paul Baragwanath works with the owners of the historic building to present an ongoing series of site-specific art installations.
Next month he moves to Wellington to take up the Rita Angus residency. He will have a solo exhibition at Bartley + Company Art in December but meanwhile his work is centre-stage on our stand at the Auckland Art Fair.
Bartley + Company Art is at the Auckland Art Fair 2011. Exhibiting works from Maryrose Crook, Roger Mortimer, Elliot Collins, Mary-Louise Browne, Kate Woods, Andre Hemer and Elizabeth Grant.
Please come see us at Stand 29 if you are in Auckland!
Most people choose to keep their dirty laundry behind closed doors. Vanessa Crowe has given hers a rather large public airing. The third recipient of funding from the Creative Communities Wellington Local Funding Scheme for the Ghuznee Street Art Billboard, Vanessa questions the ideals of fine living presented in home and lifestyle magazine to present what she says is a more common reality of organised chaos.
Her billboard features a photocollaged aerial view into her family laundry room.
“I like the idea of bringing messy lived-in spaces into public, to present a real picture of what domestic life looks like. Perhaps it allows those sharing a similar day to day struggle a sense of relief, counterbalancing the tidiness and sleek minimalist ideals of homes usually presented to us in the media,” she says.
Crowe has a Masters of Fine Arts with Distinction from Massey University where she is now teaching. Faced with the challenge of continuing her art practice while parenting young children, she found a solution was to make art about what lay in front of her – which, she says, “was often a messy house”. A fascination with ornate wallpapers led to an interest in exploring connections between order and chaos in decorative patterns and everyday domestic life. Similar installations have been shown at the Govett Brewster in New Plymouth and Mahara Gallery on the Kapiti Coast. She is also a part of the Sub Art Collective, a group of women whose practices explore crossovers between Fine Arts and Design.
Judy Millar has sent us some images of her work exhibited in Personal Structures – a Venice Biennale collateral event. The exhibition at the Palazzo Bembo opened last week and places her amongst some of the world’s most significant contemporary artists. Millar is included in an impressive line up of international artists including the likes of Joseph Kosuth and Tony Matelli.
Judy Millar - Personal Structures
Reviews are hard to come by for artists in Wellington – there are just not enough critics, writers, outlets here it seems. Mark Amery does a great job but once a fortnight is all the space allocated by the local paper and that means just 26 reviews a years – so not many shows get covered. Each gallery is lucky if it gets a review for an artist a couple of times a year. In Auckland, however, it’s a different story and virtually every show is getting reviewed on eyecontactsite.com. We know that not everyone agrees with what John Hurrell has to say but he is doing a great job recording the huge diversity of practice.
So we were very pleased to find that local “Reader, writer, speaker, thinker, doer” Courtney Johnston wrote about Judy Millar’s recent exhibition on her blog site . Here is her review titled Electric Energy:
Judy Millar’s exhibition ‘Into the belly of the whale’ at Bartley and Company on Ghuznee Street is the first time we’ve seen a dealer show of the painter’s work in Wellington for some time (her Venice Biennale work ‘Giraffe-Bottle-Gun’ was shown at Te Papa last year).
The works – eight paintings on paper and one on canvas – brim with whip-crack energy. After the large works I’ve seen lately at Te Papa and Gow Langsford, it was nice to return to a smaller scale, a body-to-body relationship with the work you’ve looking at.
The smaller scale concentrates the visual action in each work – each frames a whipping knot of short, jagged brushstrokes in its centre, laid over Millar’s signature swooping loops of thinly applied paint. Seen as thumbnails on the website, there’s a resemblance to Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji. At life size, the resemblance to a calligraphy remains, but a calligraphy that’s been caught in frenzied motion rather than at rest.
I was also reminded of McCahon’s Mondrian’s chrysanthemum of 1908, both in terms of the earthy tones (ochres, oranges and blacks dominate Millar’s works, although purple and metallic gold appear in the under-layers) and the sense of a painted ball of energy. This is an awful lot of describing words, I know, but it’s hard to look at Millar’s paintings without trying to capture in words the movement that she’s magicked into paint.
The gallery notes state that the show can be seen as ‘Miller’s tribute to writer Herman Melville’ – Miller was reading Moby Dick while working on the show, and the titles reference the sea (The Vessel, The Raft, The Sinking - although Google just brings up lots of mispelled dog-wanted pages for The Masstif for me, so maybe I need to get my Moby Dickout again). (McCahon also did a set of Moby Dick works of course, but I think we’re lurching into the world of coincidence now.) The notes continue:
As Melville immerses readers in the world of whaling and the sea, so too Millar’s richly layered gestural paintings immerse viewers in painting’s possibilities. … Millar’s painting may be perceived as abstract but she has long been interested in the depiction of three-dimensional space, which is not a concern of traditional abstraction.
It’s actually unusually easy to get literal and literary with this show. One work does look rather like a ship going down in a storm; the sense of streaks of electrical energy in the painting match to Captain Ahab’s lightening-bolt-like scar; the whirling shapes the fatal whirlpool at the end of the novel. On the other hand, I would have been deeply unlikely to have been triggered to any of this without the gallery notes, and on the whole I think I’m playing word games rather than drawing out meanings from the paintings.
Elliot Collins recently launched a new artwork at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga where he had community groups work with him to literally tie together the phrase “The World is held together so thinly”. The collaborative element and change in medium is a significant new development for this artist.
This month sees Elliot travel to Europe having secured artist residencies at the Camac Art Centre in Marnay and at the Duende Studio in Rotterdam. Elliot’s acceptance represents significant international recognition of his work. This is an exciting opportunity for him and Bartley + Company Art wish him all the best.
