Art Seen: June 02

This week, James Dignan looks at works by Samantha Matthews, Yayoi Kusama and Cilla McQueen.

 


Smoko Room, Fordell Garage, Fordell, by Samantha Matthews.
Smoko Room, Fordell Garage, Fordell, by Samantha Matthews.
"From Fordell", Samantha Matthews (Mint Gallery)

When we think of small-town New Zealand, certain images spring to mind: the rugby club, the tea rooms, the sale yards, the iconography of the banal. This is a New Zealand which is slowly disappearing, often undocumented.

In Samantha Matthews photographs, she returns to her former home, the tiny North Island town of Fordell, to revisit, relive, and inhale the kiwiana.

The photographs are a document of a dwindling countryside. The rugby posts are crooked and dwarfed by the power pylons. The interiors are scruffy and deserted.

It is, in fact, the deserted nature of the town which occupies much of Matthews' work. Human presence is there, but only by implication, and the ephemera of life appears decades old. This is a town where the swimming pool is as empty as the village hall, and all the clocks have stopped at different times.

The images are digital prints, so while occupying much the same mental space as works by the likes of Laurence Aberhart, there is none of that master's precision in the finished works.

What there is, though, is an artist and archivist's eye for nostalgia, whether it be the collected treasures on a life's mantelpiece, or the scatological scrawled observations on a bus shelter.

 


The Obliteration Room (detail), by Yayoi Kusama.
The Obliteration Room (detail), by Yayoi Kusama.
"The Obliteration Room", Yayoi Kusama (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)

"The Obliteration Room", at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, is a prime example of conceptual interactive art. It is also a prime example of fun for young children, so choose your time to visit carefully!

The exhibit consists of the interior of a sparsely furnished suburban home, painted in flat white. On entry to the gallery space, visitors are presented with a sheet of brightly coloured sticky labels, which they are encouraged to place around the display.

Over time, the coloured dots are covering up the interior, random and deliberate patterns being created and overlaid until little is left of the original white surfaces, leading to the obliteration of the display's title.

The dynamic nature of the work is being captured in a series of time-lapse photographs and videos which are being created as the exhibition runs.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama credits the idea for her work to her ability as a child to see or imagine the world as if through a dotted mesh. This childhood state has led to a series of displays, of which this is the latest, which have explored the obliteration of surfaces with vivid patterns.

The resulting rooms, though slightly claustrophobic, are bright and exhilarating spaces in which the viewer's input is an important part of the art.

 


Sshh: Sensitive Stave, by Cilla McQueen.
Sshh: Sensitive Stave, by Cilla McQueen.
‘‘Frolics: Imaginary Music'', Cilla McQueen (Brett McDowell Gallery)

Cilla McQueen has returned to the Brett McDowell Gallery with further meditations and musing on the landscape of music.

In McQueen's constructed, alternative staves, melody and harmony lines are represented by contours and forms, the timbres and tones suggested by the colours of the backgrounds and lines.

The pieces are created digitally via computer, and the resulting images are laser-printed cross-sections of aural sculpture. At times, the works approach minimalism with their simple arrays of melodic flow and geometric form placed upon glowing gradations of colour.

The work is at least partially conceptual; although the finished images are aesthetically pleasing and worthy of the title art in themselves, it is the method as much as the destination that is of supreme importance in these works.

Musical staves are simply an analogy of sound. Here the analogy takes on a further dimension by becoming topographic - in works such as Rakiura soundscape, the hills of Stewart Island are inferred in the visuals of the musical score.

Maritime also presents island and cloud profiles in its harmonic representations.

The works are highly attractive, and the concept of translation from the mode of sound to the mode of sight, with all its synaesthetic implications, is highly thought-provoking.

 


-By James Dignan

 

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