(Milford Galleries)
THE title of Israel Birch’s third solo exhibition at Milford Galleries, "Rangimarie", means peacefulness and harmony. The works in "Rangimarie" continue the artist’s conceptual and formal experimentations with text, tukutuku patterns, and sculptural techniques on steel panels that are activated by light and the position of the viewer. Birch’s practice of etching stainless steel (often with traditional whakairo/carving patterns and mark making), followed by adding layers of pigment and lacquer, and subsequent polishing, seemingly manages to both hold and refract light. Yet this holding and refracting is not stationary, but moves with the intensity and fall of light, and in response to the viewer. There is an animacy to these works that materialises the wairua, or spirit of the work, the artist, and his whakapapa.
A fuller meaning of wairua is the existence of a being’s spirit even beyond death. Through a combination of titles, text, symbolic pattern, and the continual activation of all the works by light, Birch suggests death is a voyage (Rerenga Wairua, 2020 [rerenga means voyage]), and that those existing beyond perhaps do so as a community (Purapura Whetu (Red) and (Blue), 2020), through the invocation of the tukutuku pattern purapura whetu which symbolises stars and the peoples of a nation. In times of heightened loss, the peace offered by the exhibition’s title is present in the title of two works, Kia Hora Te Marino (2020): let calm be spread.
"Between Then and Here",
DSA 2020 graduates
(RDS Gallery)
SELECTED by three anonymous referees, Between Then and Here presents works by 10 recent graduates from the Dunedin School of Art. Ranging across departments, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, screen prints, drawing and photography. With and through these various media, the emerging artists examine states of being and issues of (but not only of) contemporary life, such as systemic racism and micro-aggression, adulthood, nature/culture binaries and intersections, mental health, dysfunctional domesticity, and even nostalgia. Given the aesthetic diversity and significance of the issues it is a difficult decision to select the work of just two artists: Hemi Hosking and Pippi Miller.
The exhibition includes three, text-based, screen print works by Hosking, which make effective use of typography, composition, layering, and scale to bring the impact of racist slurs against Maori to a wider audience. Two of the epithets (pictured), which are also the titles of the works, are Taihara (2020), which means criminal, and Tahae (2020) meaning thief. According to Hosking, these works represent the intention to reclaim the slurs as has been done with other terms. One strategy Hosking deploys towards this end is the adoption of the colours of the tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) flag: red, black, and white.
Two pen and ink works by Pippi Miller, Headland IV [waves] (2020) and Headland V [marks] (2020) are especially compelling. The slender, hand-drawn lines could be waves and they are marks, but as labour-intensive striations they create worlds.
"New World Order", Hayden Fowler
(DPAG Rear Window)
AS "New World Order" can refer to Cold War and contemporary anti-government conspiracies, in addition to the world reshaping impact of Covid-19, and chickens seemingly symbolise everything from maternal love to happiness, moral fortitude, and curiosity, Hayden Fowler (and yes, let us observe his surname) has created a video work that lampoons the absurd. Excluding Covid-19 of course. But why am I talking about chickens? They are one of three subjects in New World Order, alongside a blasted stand of somewhat artificial-looking trees and the artist’s deployment of a particular mode of transitioning from scene to scene. The latter becomes a subject through the emergence of a frame reminiscent of film contact sheets that subsequently turns into movement (from right to left, up or down). Frame and movement become one, which in the context of the film introduces a complementary element of surveillance.
Essentially, one entity, chickens, which have been overlaid with diverging anthropomorphic symbolism are surveilled via the frame/movement modality as they strut, fly, or squawk through the desolate trees. To heighten the absurdity, the chickens Fowler selected (and trained) are rare heritage breeds. At the beginning of the film, a brood of white chickens emerge one-by-one from a burrow at the base of a tree, and walk around the edge of a small pool of water. Their movements appear nervous, and hurried. The only sounds are squawks modified and distorted to resemble warning alarms.
Robyn Maree Pickens
