Provocations. A single word which sums up not just Nigel Brown's latest exhibition at Milford Galleries, but most of the artist's career.
Brown's icons of New Zealand's terrain and the human mark upon it sit in counterpoint to the stream-of-consciousness words which surround and frame them as lyrics to the artistic melody of the central image. In the current exhibition, the works are large, the images dwarfed by the surrounding verbiage which stands out from a stark chalkboard-like ground. Picture and text complement each other and provide challenges - provocations - to our understanding of our country and our place in the world.
The words are sometimes overtly political, sometimes searching for a path that is distinctly ours among ideas laid down by our Polynesian and colonial past. Brown acknowledges the past's influence, in his images of Cook, of native carving, and his allusions to classical art and poetry.
At the heart of many of the paintings, however, is the ‘‘ordinary bloke'', Mulgan's Man Alone softened by Barry Crump's yarns and the caricature of Fred Dagg. This is the young New Zealand, searching for a place in a rapidly changing world, one eye on history, the other on the land, a provocation to any outsiders who want to take away our newly formed identity.
John Toomer's art, like Nigel Brown, is searching for the essence of New Zealand. Here, however, is where any similarity ends. Rather than Brown's questioning of identity and meaning, Toomer searches for an archetype of the land, the lone structure in the empty landscape which is an essential feature in the psyche of rural New Zealand.
Toomer's oil panels and canvases are precisely, lovingly painted. His empty skies and distant hills evoke feelings of the vast expanses of the countryside which directly counterpoint the solitary buildings trapped within them. The play of light on surfaces is emphasised, rather than the rigidity or otherwise of the structures themselves, giving images such as Pump House (near Gore) an ethereal quality.
Only in one image is the building removed from its dwarfing backdrop, and in this piece, the impressive but unusually composed Shearer's Quarters Under Snow, the solitude is still present, marked by the untrammelled white winter carpet before the doors of the building. In other works, composition is formal and portrait-like, the structures being placed front and centre. The artist's skill, however, is enough to turn even a subject as mundane as a group of old oil cans into a fascinating image.
Another aspect of the search for the real New Zealand is on display in Frank Gordon's exhibition at The Fix Cafe.
Those familiar with Frank Gordon and used to his whimsical Chagall-like scenes of people and life around Dunedin will perhaps be surprised by this exhibition, as it is a change of direction for the artist. As he himself writes, this is his first dedicated landscape show, composed of works painted on driftwood and depicting the places where the wood was found, beside rivers and lakes, and on beaches. The works become memory traces, a psychogeography of the land, somehow imbued with the nature of the place where they lay until found.
Because of the nature of the driftwood, many of the images are tiny, cameos only a handful of centimetres across. This in many ways adds to their charm, as does their unusual shapes. There are no neat rectangles here, landscapes have been made to fit the often unusual forms of the wood. The artist has cleverly used some of the shapes to create the basis of the composition, most readily seen in a jagged, tooth-shaped block turned into an image of Mitre Peak. Fragments of survey maps have been painted into several of the images, providing further geographical grounding for the art.
-By James Dignan