The Un-Sited: from the Wellington City
Council City Arts Collection
City Gallery Wellington, 29 January-25 April 2011
Essay by Aaron Lister, Curator New Zealand Art
Civic art collections are often laden with overt signs of place,
proudly showcasing local scenes, natural glories or prominent
personalities. Yet a commitment to collecting contemporary art
necessarily turns attention elsewhere, towards practices that skirt
around or behind such expectations. It’s their place in the Wellington
City Council City Arts collection that ushers these disparate works
together into this space for this exhibition. But it is their
collective fight against or interrogation of the concept of site so
integral to such collections that provides the real emphasis for their
being here, right now.
Kate J Woods' Non-site (2009) clears the ground that allows these works
to operate together, despite being the most closely bound to the
landscape genre and figuration. Woods salvages discarded landscape
photographs and paintings from second hand stores, which are
re-photographed with the addition of collaged crystalline structures,
collapsing disparate sites and moments into one another.
Wood’s real site of engagement is land art of the 1970s, especially the
ongoing life granted to its site-bound and time-based works through
photographic documentation. Woods’ photographs revel in this act of
de-contextualisation. She incongruously plants Robert Smithson
earthworks and Brancusi columns into New Zealand lakes, while applying
the life-extending qualities of the non-site to these withering local
scenes which are transformed into something mysteriously other and
alien. This trading on un-specificity, on the possibilities that come
with un-siting objects and histories, takes Wood’s work away from the
real into the fantastical, linking the art historical non-site with the
collapsed/alternate worlds of science fiction.
The wispy crystalline entity that acts as a portal between spaces in
Non-site is mirrored in the empty void in Sandra Schmidt’s Membrane
Dissected (2008) and the hovering forms that threaten to float out of
the frame in Ruth Thomas-Edmond’s drawings. Both artists work intensely
on a small scale to build up accumulations of shape and colour that are
non-representational yet offer distant echoes of landscape forms.
Schmidt evokes a pre-world or pre-site rising from the elements in the
process of becoming something, somewhere, or even someone.
Thomas-Edmond’s frantic drawing marks are suggestive of human
endeavour. Their urgent directional movement across and claiming of
empty tracts of white space evoke traversal or mapping. In both cases
this sense of worlds caught in the process of their own construction is
conveyed through obsessive and labour-intensive acts of making:
Thomas-Edmond’s patterned and repeated drawing marks, Schmidt’s fusing
of hundreds of plastic hama beads which transforms the children’s craft
material from a learning tool into an aid to foster unknowing.
Molly Samsell’s Interface (2008) performs a related act of material
deception. This 8.4 meter photograph of a section of Samsell’s studio
wall sets up a continually oscillating and at times perplexing
relationship between subject (a wall), image (a photograph of a wall)
and object (a photograph hanging on a wall). Site is another shifting
factor in this nexus. The photographic print reveals traces of its
making in a specific site: its scale is determined by the physical
dimensions of the studio, its tonal variations by the light falling
from the windows adjacent to the wall. The making of the work was a
carefully controlled and measured negotiation of these physical
properties. When encountered beyond this site, these elements are
experienced in a complex abstract sense that tests the veracity of
visual perception and knowledge.
Samsell’s doubling of walls also plays off the modernist myth of both
studio and gallery as non-sites of sorts, somehow existing apart from
the everyday world. Where
Samsell works to un-site photography, a medium once deemed too closely
bound to everyday experiences to really matter, Simon Morris and Victor
Berezovsky pick at the supposed autonomy of abstract painting,
privileged within modernism for sharing the studio's rejection of the
everyday. Both painters seek to extend the possibilities of
contemporary abstraction through generating rather than closing off
connections with the world outside their studio walls. The studio and
the artwork are reclaimed as a site of activity, an interface between
art and the everyday world.
Morris'
process-orientated paintings insist on their connection to the daily
routine of artist working in the studio. Blue Line 54 minutes (2008)
and Blue Line 56 minutes (2008) chart the time spent on their making.
The blue line snaking its way across these two coarse linen canvases is
the product of situated labour and skill, determined by a specific set
of decisions and actions carried out by a physical body in real space
and real time, not some autonomous aesthetic realm. Berezovsky demands
that his paintings physically register the history of their own making.
The artist's intuitive response to and ultimate transformation of
materials through a slow and labour-intensive accrual of actions are
all laid bare, serving to locate apparently abstract work within
everyday activities of making and being. The ‘ruptureR
17; of this painting
extends beyond the various formal processes that work over, across and
dig beneath its surface to encompass a state in-between the abstract
and the figurative, the studio and the physical world, the sited and
the un-sited.
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith's Armada (2006) uproots the familiar concept of
the artist immersed in the full majesty of nature so revered in
site-based practices like landscape painting. Holloway-Smith recognised
a non-site of sorts when icebergs broke from Antarctic ice shelves and
drifted towards New Zealand in 2006. This bringing together of alien
and familiar landscapes and crossing of geographic and temporal
boundaries made little sense in traditional landscape terms, yet
paralleled the mash and flow of imagery and experiences in the digital
realm around which Holloway-Smith increasingly orientates her practice.
Where countless artists have travelled to Antarctica seeking some kind
of sublime wonder, Holloway-Smith stayed indoors and turned to the
virtual world. The icebergs were recreated in her living room by
draping furniture with sheets, based on internet-sourced imagery. These
furtive forms were then rendered on multiple canvases in
Holloway-Smith's distinctive cross hatched drawing style which in
mimicking pixilated digital effects offers a perverse new kind of 'life
drawing'. In its conception, form and presentation Armada channels the
changing ways we experience and move through the world via a digital
interface that necessarily transforms traditional understandings of
cultural practices like art and landscape.
If the condition of being un-sited does provide a space to gather these
artists and works together, it is necessarily a fragmentary and
ungrounded one where lines of convergence are splintered by points of
difference. Yet this realm of the interface, of figments, rupture and
dissection does not operate apart from the everyday – its coveted state
of un-sitedness speaks to the experiences of contemporary art and the
contemporary city as strongly as any of the landscapes or portraits
more regularly sighted within civic collections.
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©copyright Victor Berezovsky 2006-2017
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