This week in Art Seen, Robyn Maree Pickens looks at works by Yuki Kihara, Anne-Marie Davis, and Karl Maughan.
Video still from Invocation, by Yuki Kihara.
‘‘Invocation’’, Yuki Kihara (Milford Galleries)
Of Samoan and Japanese descent, Yuki Kihara (b. 1975) emigrated from Samoa to Aotearoa/New Zealand at the age of 16. Although here reduced to biographical detail, it is this complex of cultural identities, and in particular the impact of colonisation on race, gender and sexuality, that informs Kihara's work.
Invocation (2016) is a single-channel digital video work (7 minutes 25 seconds) that continues many of the themes in Kihara's oeuvre.
It is that rare work that yields a rich experience for a viewer encountering it without any prior knowledge. From a dense black, the only element illuminated by light is a pair of hands.
These hands, and the movements they make, may remind one of the karanga on to a marae, or the articulate gestures common to traditional Pacific Island dance, or of waves coming in to shore.
Gradually, the hands replicate themselves and multiply, resembling as they do the movement of bones beneath skin, or some archaic arachnoid.
In time, the many hands skilfully form a skull that in turn elaborates on itself, morphing, tracing, disappearing, reappearing.
Aspects of these hand articulations reference the Samoan traditional dance taualuga, and the practice, which continues today, of liulotofaga, whereby the bones of ancestors are oiled and wrapped in siapo (bark cloth) before being reburied. Do visit.
emerge 11, by Anne-Marie Davis.
‘‘Lateral Volition’’, Anne-Marie Davis (Botanic Garden Information Centre)
With seven photographs, like the first seven syllables of a traditional haiku, Kaitangata artist Anne-Marie Davis presents a gradual cyclic movement from winter's bare branches to the flimsy clamour of summer's sweet peas in flower.
Davis has indeed extended her volition and vision laterally to capture the lives of trees, plants and flowers in moments that appear quiet and resting, even unto themselves.
This quality is accentuated by Davis' selective use of soft focus in areas of some photographs, to hint at, in one work, what might be the faded threads of moth wings caught in the gleam of a spider's web.
Yet not all the photographic works portray nature ''as it is''. As the seasons cycle into spring and summer, Davis has allowed, even encouraged, the pixelated bones of the digital medium to feature as part of the image.
Through her manipulations and enlargements we find traces of how the digital image found form; its materiality is made evident.
In a similar manner, Davis manipulates colours beyond their traditional register (particularly in the spring-summer works), into brilliant reds, purples and greens, while formal elements, such as flowers, are arranged into unexpected and arresting compositions.
The combination of these techniques results in photographic works that appear to melt, at times, into the painterly.
Colpman Avenue, by Karl Maughan.
‘‘Into the Woods’’, Karl Maughan (Milford Galleries)
As punk mellowed into pop during the mid 1980s, Elam art student Karl Maughan began painting gardens. A seemingly unlikely subject for a young art student, it is, nevertheless, one that has proved particularly malleable and fruitful over the ensuing three decades.
One reading of this choice points towards formal concerns: with its vivid colours and blocks of shape, the garden enables Maughan to execute endless studies in the play of light and shade, and colour relationships.
Correspondingly, the use of oil paint applied in thick impasto lends itself to experiments with surface, gesture and texture.
Another reading invites the viewer to contemplate the role gardens have played historically and culturally, as the imprint of humankind on nature; symbolically in religious traditions, as a duality of nourishment and banishment, and contemporarily, for those fortunate among us, as a sanctuary or locus of leisure.
Yet the way in which Maughan harnesses these elements produces a thoroughly satisfying sense of unease among the hyper-shrubbery.
With hortensia (hydrangeas) dominating the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) in this latest body of work, it is tempting to suggest that Maughan has reached an apogee of sorts.
Into the Woods is a significant exhibition that demonstrates not only the generative potential of the garden, but Maughan's ability to keep it fresh.
-By Robyn Maree Pickens
