Marc Blake is a New Zealand-born artist who, in 2002, moved to Japan for four and a-half years to fuel and explore his fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics. The result of this time, in conjunction with his existing experience, dexterity and perceptiveness, is a pristine collection of highly stylised and softly rendered dream-like landscapes.
By editing and tracing photographic images, Blake creates sparse landscapes which visibly follow the grain of the wood upon which he paints and draws in graphite, coloured pencil, pigment, and acrylic paint. The imagery is eerie, wistful, and chic as the ostensibly lone figures and animals move through unadorned settings broken only by the occasional tree, distant wave, bird or human "other" - and that's just it; the isolated and at times ghostly figures, whilst sharing the same pictorial space, do not communicate togetherness or receptiveness. They appear to exist in the same space at different times and the landscapes seem to harbour their memories.
Proverbs echo throughout Blake's works as the figures preoccupy themselves within suspended moments. The collection presents a marvellously surreal but utterly convincing amalgamation of contemporary and traditional conventions and styles in what is, ultimately, an enchanting evolution of artistic praxis.
This all-female group show stems from the artists' desire to emphasise the presence of female makers within the Dunedin art scene. In a gallery whose exhibitions have inadvertently, but predominantly, entertained male artists, this group collectively respond to (or collectively respond through) their femininity.
From Sinclair's reliably picturesque landscape painting to mi$$match's pink explosion of hip-hop inspired attitude, or from Carran's portentous, pendulum-like stack of prisms hanging from the ceiling to McIsaac's small but striking descriptively entitled sculpture: Lipstick ascending on caterpillar tracks on a hill in a blizzard in a jar, there are multiple departure points for contemplation beneath an overriding statement about female presence in the art world - precisely what that statement is, however, is ambiguous. The works are said to be in dialogue with one another and while some visual analogies are apparent, the objects' exchanges are otherwise vague.
Separately, the arrangements are complete and thoughtful - they can easily be imbued with unique and even profound significance; collectively though, their lucidity wavers. This is not a condemnation of the collection but a reflection on the strength each work harbours in isolation. Girlz is thus an enjoyable exhibition by virtue of its variety, attitude and female solidarity rather than by way of coherency.
If you are seeking mindless mimesis, do not go to the Blue Oyster Gallery. Ever. This experimental art space is determined to make its viewers search and question contemporary artistic and socio-cultural perceptions in a critical manner, and its current exhibition Caves are made of rock but not this cave certainly encapsulates that desire.
Using the cave as a metaphorical location for female consciousness, these three established artists and writers have come together to create an expressively particularised space for introspection. Through the channels of poetry, audiovisual material, digital and drawn images, as well as large three-dimensional, mixed-media forms (comprising wood, tape, fabric, glitter and stuffing) the Lower Gallery and adjoining corridor is transformed into a sparkling grotto trimmed with prose. The space appears to physically leak organic outpourings of viscerality in response to, and in conjunction with, Fleming's evocative poetry and the female experience more generally.
As one's eyes are met with seething, inherently sexual, abstract yet defiantly female forms, one's mind is filled with concepts of innateness, searchingness, sensibility and self-experience.
The cave becomes a primal space in which woman fumbles, finds, flowers and falls as her search for self-recognition and self-representation ensues - this is an honest and probing exhibition.
- Franky Strachan.
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