"Unreliable Narratives", Tyler Kennedy Stent and Lucy Eglington
(The Artist’s Room)
The Artist’s Room is hosting a joint exhibition by two painters with widely divergent styles.
The better-known of the two locally is Tyler Kennedy Stent.
Stent is expert in capturing the moment in his scenes of young people going about their daily life, here epitomised by the excellent detail and bravura mark-making of works such as Impunity and Escape Unscathed. These works have a power which is only enhanced by their seemingly unfinished nature; the paint trails off into colour test patches at the edges of the works, emphasising that we are simply viewing a frame from a life where nothing is yet determined. Stent, in these works, is working in what is for him a new medium, rich oil paint.
The boldness of Stent’s work is excellently contrasted by the soft shading of magic realist oils by Lucy Eglington. The artist’s images appear as if from dreamscapes — the all-knowing poised hounds of Sentinels, the giantess of The Dreamer and the Dream. Two of the works appear as opposite sides of the same coin, Weaver and Corona featuring the same sleeping (dead?) stag in very different surroundings.
The gap between the two styles is neatly bridged by three charming watercolours from Stent, featuring children and small animals.
(RDS Gallery)
"Stars and Flowers" is the latest exhibition of work by Peter Cleverley at RDS Gallery.
A meditation on the ephemeral and the eternal, it is influenced in no small part by the 2023 death of the artist’s mother.
The subject matter of the paintings and the exhibition’s title both reflect the transient bloom of life set against the seemingly infinite. As such, the exhibition becomes something of a memento mori, a meditation on the intimation and intimidation of mortality.
Cleverley’s forms are deliberately sketchily painted. The titular work and the related Black Moons present their ambiguous forms as patches of colour against the black void. Like our lives, they are momentary bursts of colour in the darkness. Just a Minute and the heady indigo arrangement of Flowers for Peace show flowers that seem otherworldly, floating alone in their magnificence.
One of the show’s simplest works is perhaps the most telling: Thank You for the Days presents two dead blooms and an empty vase against a sky blue backdrop. Before her death, Cleverley’s mother requested that her coffin be painted sky blue with images of flowers decorating it. The similarity in colour and subject, when paired with this work’s title — lyrics from a song of thanks to a departed companion — tell a tale of poignant, heartfelt loss.
(Fe29 Gallery)
Fe29 Gallery is alive with toy-like clay animals and plants, the work of ceramicist Bronwyn Gayle.
The works are simultaneously lighthearted and deadly serious. It is difficult not to smile at the semi-robotic cows which are a major feature of many of the sculptures, or to be captivated by the tentacle-like forms of the artist’s tree fern shoots and the phantom-like white glass moths that sit around them. There is a charm and a beauty in these works, whether deliberately humorous or taken at face value.
Underlying these works, however, is a more important theme, that of environmental crisis. The cows are automatons because that is how we use and abuse farmed wildlife, yet the question of how we treat the animals and the ground they graze on has become something of a sacred cow, a "don’t ask, don’t tell" struggle for business and conservation. The sculpted mamaku is darkened with a glaze containing the ashes of the same plant. Hope is present, however, provided in the form of the puriri or ghost moth, still to be seen flitting around the forest.
As is often the case with Gayle’s exhibitions, the artist has provided written and photographic notes which provide insight into the works and make fascinating reading.
