Denys Watkins and Cultural Diplomacy

Denys Watkin's latest work 'walks some words around'. It roughly traces the progress of recent travel - both real and imagined. There's signage from Mount Eden, text from New York, the world's tallest man, names of songs, and hand-lettering that harks back to his training at Wellington Polytech in the 1960s.

don't worry, be happy

We talked to Brit Bunkley recently about his latest work in don't worry, be happy.

MNG: You often include animals in your work that are distorted by human interaction - the sheep with jets under its skin, the cow with the train roller-coasting through it.

BB: These animals are the life blood of the New Zealand export economy. They are also part of my personal environment. I have lived in rural New Zealand for the last 15 years. My studio is often surrounded by sheep and cattle including our pets and those belonging to the farmer who uses our land.

These magical realist interactions that you mention, are metaphors of apocalyptic fear. The jets and trains that move under the skin of animals are darkly humorous, uncanny events that fit within the art paradigm of Maurizio Catelan. (I believe that Catelan legitimized humor in art more than any other contemporary artist.)

Apocalyptic fear has been endemic for years in film, literature and art. The traditional myth of the Apocalypse is filled with typically poetic mythic events such as water turning to blood, persecutions by dragons, and encounters with a woman clothed with the sun, the moon, and the stars. There have been plenty of quite realistic apocalyptic scenarios in my lifetime from several near misses of all-out nuclear war to the increasing possibility of scorched earth global warming.

I am an optimist and believe that human creativity, humor and rational critical thinking can improve our future as long as it is acted upon. As Noam Chomsky says, we don’t know what lies in the future or if our actions can help, but we can chose optimism. Inaction and fear will only guarantee pessimism.

MNG: In this exhibition you have used a lot of satellite images as backgrounds. Superimposed over these are a giant (if you consider them in relation to the satellite backgrounds) bridge, a cow, and a cathedral. What's your thinking about this scale relationship? It makes me think of power relationships...

BB: All the works refers to power relationships; and yes this is one method of delivery. These particular works also refer to the strange formal relationship between the two-dimensional image of the satellite photographs, and the virtual three-dimensional computer objects that I find uncanny and irrational like a Zen Koan. The ability to approach photographic realism is cut short by the obvious incongruent scale shifts.

MNG: And what about the Simpons? Why use Homer's nuclear power plant?

BB: The simply drawn cartoon of the Simpsons is transformed into the real (as is its meaning) with virtual photographic technology. A satellite photograph of a snow strewn countryside is mapped onto the surface of the 3D model providing a unique lifeless landscape. The Simpsons are seen as a form of reality by many, and many now feel they get a better grasp of current events from satirical shows such as the Daily Show or The Colbert Report (mostly in the USA, but also shown here on TV) than mainstream media news.

MNG: The granite mushroom cloud is almost a monument to nuclear energy. This work seems to walk the fine line between sinister and the celebratory... like a creepy businessman?

BB: It is. An acceptance of that which scares us provides the ability to overcome the obstacle. Finding beauty in the terrible has been a tactic in many art forms from the blues to the genre of apocalyptic films such as Mad Max or The Road, to the surreal work by David Lynch where good and evil are interchangeable and fluid. Mushroom clouds have an ominous beauty - a “terrible beauty” of Yeats.

Granite, that most monumental of materials, can capture the moment in a benign way. In this case the slim shaft (supported by a steel rod) holds a piece of granite weighing almost 50 kilos. The mysterious force of gravity is seemingly suspended. In addition all granite contains trace elements of (mostly) harmless radioactive materials.

MNG: What about the relationship between tiling in the computer graphics sense, and tiling over a computer screen, hard drive and printer?

BB: Tiling is a method of placing photographic or graphic imagery over a 3D digital model to give the appearance of realism - “virtual reality”. In this instance I tried to reverse the process by tiling hyperrealist tiles over old computers who “print out” a virtual model of themselves. The title “Existence Precedes Essence”, the famous existential quote by Sartre is meant to be ironic. Computers are the very essence of essence.

Also in a sense it is the opposite of Rachel Whiteread’s method of filling space between and within an object - instead I enclose objects.

MNG: And the bricked in television?

BB: Yes this is the same as the tiles, though the brick is far more earthy – not shiny or “pretty”. Along with the computer, TV is the main vehicle for transmitting knowledge these days. Here it is    rendered inert and ironic.

MNG: The gnomes are like the everyman. They were from another project right?

BB: The sculpture project, 'Primitive Accumulation' was a 1500 mm x 1500 mm x 1500 mm cube-like structure consisting of approximately 1500 garden gnomes. It began conceptually as a reaction to the abuse of cheap labour from China - as the old joke goes, “just wait until the communists take over!”

Ironically gnomes were banned in East Germany as symbols of the bourgeoisie. Gnomes now are associated with kitsch, not at all bourgeois... whatever that means. Communism has/had as much to do with social justice and socialisms as it did with democracy in those “socialist democratic republics”.

The title, Primitive Accumulation is derived from both the Marxist economic term “primitive accumulation” and economist Adam Smith’s term “original accumulation”. Both terms refer to the foundation of capitalism and "the accumulation of stock" as a precondition for the division of labour. With primitive accumulation “large swaths of the population are violently divorced from their traditional means of self-sufficiency” (Robert Gehl). Essentially the economy is kick started with the aid of dispossessed and desperate labourers who may (...or may not) create enough wealth for subsequent generations to enjoy.

But basically I thought it was just weird idea that would look interesting. When the temporary sculpture was destroyed I immediately thought of a method to try to reconstruct the ruins of the old work, and resin was the ideal material since it froze the materials in time as if drooped into a vehicle for suspended animation. Ten gnomes looked as if they were drowning. I have restructured materials since art school in the late seventies.

The Big Bang at Cook & Co

Double happies, a fire at sea, an assassination of the queen... what is happening at Cook & Co?

Arson at Sea 2010

Cook & Co are in the process of rebranding. In preparation for her exhibition in Amsterdam next year, Octavia is 'exploding' what we know about Cook & Co. And in 2011 she'll be unveiling the reborn identity of her global jewellery company.

Octavia in the Cook Brand Combustible Torque 2010.
Photograph by Haru Sameshima.

Anarchy at Cook & Co

There's Anarchy in Avondale and a mutiny on the high seas of Cook & Co as Octavia Cook looks back to the days before the establishment of Cook & Co. In these rebellious teenage years there was the Cook brand when notions of jewellery and value were tried out and thrown in the air - like these wigs in Wig Riot 2010 (pictured).

Beneath the Blue - Joanna Langford

Just fresh from the NewDowse where she has installed a work for the exhibition Under Construction, Joanna Langford moved into our space for the weekend to hang and construct Beneath the Blue.

We talked to Jo about the work and possible new directions for her 'architecture of the fantastical'.

MNG: Someone said something interesting about your work recently in the context of your use of skewers. They said that traditionally that was how sculpture and spatial relationships were taught at art schools, using skewers to delineate space and as the basis for forms. Which makes your work as much as sculpture as it does about architecture... any thoughts on that?

JL: I think of my work as installation or sculpture or paintings in real space. In a way I think it's all quite similar - there is an interest in materials, form, space and illusion.

MNG: These latest wall works also seem to be about some kind of expanded painting or drawing, would you agree?

JL: I do a lot of photoshop drawings when I am working towards an installation. This allows me to play with the materials and motifs in virtual space. The wall works that I made for Beneath the Blue originated from these drawings. I had also painted a wall in my studio blue to create a ‘blue screen’ for an animation I am making (a blue screen of green screen is often used in film so you can film action in the foreground and add a back ground later). I started to adopt this screen for the background for my drawings.

MNG: With the floor works we are back in familiar Jo Langford territory, except that the view has shifted to Iceland or the Antarctic...

JL: Imagery of Iceland has been lurking in my consciousness since I did a residency there in 2008. I am interested in landscapes that exist in the real but that have a feeling of the fantastic. Iceland is one of these places. The expansive lava fields and smoky geothermal happenings in the snow-scape makes it feel otherworldly. There is also a sense of unease in this landscape that hints at the drama that is going on beneath us - a mass that is in flux, a gurgling and surging up.

MNG: In earlier work you have used liquorcie allsorts and wafers to build your constructions and in the Any Dream series you have used icing sugar. How do you connect confectionary and the landscape/urbanscape (the delicacy seems perfect)?

JL: I am primarily interested in the formal qualities of these materials - the color and texture.

From the stairway to the heavens - Joanna Langford

Joanna Langford's Beneath the Blue series moves away from her 'stairways to heavens', and finds us up above the streets amongst the clouds in an urban skyline clutterd with aerials, and cell phone towers.

Delicate threads 'draw' silhouettes of masting lit by tiny LED lights that glow from their uppermost tips.

Tom Sladden's 'Sleepers'

Duck! included six new paintings by Tom Sladden. The substrates on which all of the images in this exhibition are painted have a pre-history - sometimes marks from their former lives, sometimes holes from screws and protrusions.



Charger 2002-2010 above is a good example of Tom's interest in what isn't painted, what isn't said - and the holes and marks circle the blocks of colour adding to the atmosphere around them.



Study for everything I know 2009-2010 is a whimsical painting that hints and hides. It reminds me of good poetry - open-ended and suggestive but ultimately enjoyable because it doesn't tie down meaning or answer questions.

John Roy and the art of denial

John Roy is one of the three artists in Duck! currently on at the gallery. John works in ceramics and his work stands out amongst peers working in the same medium. Primarily figurative, it sets up associations between us and the things that we create - like buildings, the rabbit problem, relationships, religion .

We recently talked to John about his work.

MNG: You originally wanted to call the exhibition "Head in the Sand" or something similar. Can you talk about the ideas that started this series off?

JR: It was keep your head down, I was also the one that came up with Duck! It is pretty much self-explanatory I feel, when you look at what is going on at the moment.

MNG: Lots of people have commented on the patterns in this new series of work. They seem like the patterns and colour of New Mexico. Were you looking at these?

JR: I haven’t heard that one before. They are more like an abstracted camouflage pattern breaking up the lines of the pared back forms. They have more in common with street maps or circuit boards.

MNG: Your works are always perforated in some way. Anything you want to say about that? I know sometimes it suggests architecture...

JR: The holes and cuts are like drawing with dark and light, in that a hole is the blackest black, and when viewed from another angle light come through. I also like the contradiction it creates as the forms look solid and heavy. Sometimes they are about architecture.

MNG: I'm also intrigued by the way you use the brick patterns. In this series it seems to cement the idea of head in the sand, ie. the figures are stuck. What would you say about that?

JR: It is all about the traditional associations of the terracotta clay in this country.



MNG: And then there is the large impressive work with it's head stuck up the arse of someone else. What's going on there...?

JR: I felt the need to make a large piece as I can make larger works. I felt that people in Wellington had only seen smaller pieces and assumed that that was all I did.



MNG: Your work seems to also be about an aesthetic of awkwardness. Would you agree?

JR: No I see it more as more of a transformation, turning something into something else. I also like being ambiguous. A object is more interesting if it is about more than one thing.

Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Daddy

We talked to Scott Eady about his recent exhibition Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Daddy.



MNG: In the past your work has taken a humorous look at masculinity as it manifests locally. This new work seems to be about the anxieties of parenting, but there are some tongue-in-cheek references to 'child prodigies' and 'o my child could do that' attitudes to art. The humour of the small bronzes off-sets that very sad clown. What was your thinking there?

SE: Parenting has to be the toughest yet most rewarding job in the universe. But it comes with enormous responsibility – a responsibility that translates to a universal anxiety which I can only imagine all parents must experience. We want to protect our children from all dangers but realise the need to instil them with the skills and tools necessary to negotiate a not-always friendly world.

Apparently children laugh on average 300 times a day. Adults laugh on average only 15 times a day. Why is that? I guess for adults, it is RESPONSIBILITY and the knowledge that innocence is only short-lived.

Give a child a few blocks of ‘Dukit’ (bakeable modelling plastcine) and within minutes the baking tray will be full with playful, colourful forms. Give an adult the same material and they will likely over-think the process, the material and the expected outcome until the whole exercise becomes unproductive or silly.

The reference to ‘child prodigies’ is intentionally tongue-in-cheek. Yes ‘one’s child could do that’, they could make the ‘Dukit’ marquettes - they take only minutes. But to then employ the complicated and costly process of enlarging the marquettes, making silicone rubber moulds and finally casting in bronze and painting them, is just absurd, stupid even.



We are so accustomed to seeing the bronze uber-monument, so a tiny brightly painted bronze on a narrow plinth, a scaled-up figure by one of your three children - actually a whole series of painted bronzes - is quite another experience.

Why paint the bronzes? Why scale up children's marquettes? So many people seem to take offence at the idea of painted bronze. I don’t understand why. Traders of scrap metal value bronze quite differently to the art world even though many of the industrial scrap forms found at a yard could well have come from the same furnace used to produce a bronze sculpture.

Bronze is not a precious metal, yet to my children it represents treasure. They would often sift through the foundry sand in search of small bronze spills. We would polish the small pieces and they would trade them like gold at school.

The colour (paint) applied to the finished bronzes brought all the joy back to the forms. Unpainted, the sculptures were bronze forms first and foremost. They spoke of the material and it’s history. By painting the objects the material and the history remained but came second to form and colour. The glossy paint finish heightens the desire to touch and hold the objects at which point the weight also revealed the material.



The huge drawing also looked fantastic as bare aluminium, however the material once again dominated, diminishing the importance of the line. By powder coating the drawing black the line became all important and the aluminium all but disappeared. By scaling-up my children’s marquettes in bronze I was effectively monumentalising their work - making permanent things that would otherwise eventually disappear into the ether (trash).

MNG: You have written about wanting to give your children a positive experience of having an artist as a father? How did you do that in relation to this exhibition?

SE: It is really important to me that I spend loads of quality time with my family. Like most parents, this requires juggling work commitments and domestic duties in order to create that time. I want my children to remember me as a good family man. By including my children in the process of making the exhibition Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Daddy, we got to spend lots of time together and rather than my work be something foreign to them they took ownership of the forms, the ideas and even the titles.

MNG: Dubuffet and other Modernists were of course interested in the drawings of children, and you have mentioned Modernism in the context of the exhibition. What was your thinking there?

SE: Give a young child a pencil and paper and they will immediately produce marks/images. They do not hesitate. It was the freeing from intellectual concerns that affected Jean Dubuffet’s interest in ‘Outsider Art’ and art produced by children. He recognised in the work, an unlocking of the artists’ most basic creative instincts, a strategy he employed in the production of his own work which he chose to term “raw art”(Art Brut).

Personally I am not sure it is possible for an art-schooled adult, to free him/herself completely from intellectual concerns. I had great difficulty making and justifying the making of my own abstract clay forms as they were not honest. My children made them honest.

That said, I cannot help but be impressed by Urs Fischer’s recent hulking, lumpy cast aluminium sculptures which are simply scaled-up handfuls of squeezed clay. Despite their fully abstract forms the sculptures are still humanlike; in fact, they remind me a lot of the figurative bronzes produced by Willem de Kooning in the 1970’s. It seems it is difficult to escape the figure. Even my children found it necessary to give most the works human or animal related titles.

Lauren Lysaght and The House of Lentigo

Lauren Lysaght is an artist who has found her time. For years her practice didn't seem to fit with the ideas of the times (the eighties and nineties). She made work that was sculptural (but not Sculpture) based around ideas about kitsch and craft, and low/high art amongst other things. Her work was really only shown by the risk-taking Dowse Art Museum of Lower Hutt.

But in today's contemporary art scene, her work fits perfectly with its interest in ideas and materials that amplify those ideas.

The House of Lentigo, her new exhibition which opened last night, is no exception. A series of Rococo-esque 'mirrors' contain an image of a leopard, the Leopard of Lentigo, or the Leopard of Our Old Age (not to be confused with the coogar!).

More soon.

French knitted Christianity

We talked to Megan Hansen-Knarhoi recently about her latest work in Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious.

MNG: What is the attraction of wool?

MHK: Wool, string, cotton and yarn are the materials that have a constant presence in my life. They’re the materials I’m most attracted to and enjoy working with. To me the question “What is the attraction of wool?” is difficult to answer. It would be like asking a painter “What is the attraction of paint for you?”

There is such a great variety of textures, structures and colours and they are wonderful sculptural materials. Like Christianity, the materials I use are omnipresent. Everywhere you look you will see something made with wool, string, cotton or yarn. (At the same time everywhere you look you will see something painted).

MNG: You have always crotcheted works sculpturally. How do you decide on what?

MHK: Crochet is a method of manipulating my raw materials. I continue to investigate various methods of sculpting, drawing and painting, using crochet, knitting, French knitting, stitching, knotting and starching.

I tend to think and visualise in three dimensions, so sculpture is perfect for the manifestation for my ideas.

MNG: Much of your work takes a side-ways look at Christianity - sideways but not necessarily irreverent. Want to say anything about that?

MHK: Christianity has an imperious presence throughout our national culture, society, speech and psyche. Churches and Christian iconography seem omnipresent. People consciously or unconsciously refer to god in their everyday speech, “Oh my God”, “Jesus”, “Jesus Christ” being common expletives or exclamations used to express a range of emotions including anger, surprise, disbelief, amazement, sexual excitement, sadness, enthusiasm and so on.

Christianity and Christians have made irreparable alterations to a plethora of indigenous cultures, and confused millions around issues of sex and sexuality.

On the flip-side, Christianity brings comfort to and makes sense of the world for a huge amount of people. So as confusing as I find it to worship a male god, I understand the benefits this has for many. I think my work successfully addresses satire, critique and celebration.

MNG: You talk about being compulsive obsessive - and JSG is definitely that - but there is also a sense of the meditiativeness of making that is reflected in the subject matter, especially the rosary beads. Somehow this almost aligns with 'praying', or contemplation?

MHK: I think most repetitive labour intensive activities have some sort of meditative quality. It can be a time to relax, de-stress, and centre. That’s what religion does for people too. Performing a task repeatedly brings a sense of calm to a cacophonous world.

Joyful Sorrowful Glorous

Megan Hansen-Knarhoi's latest work takes a sideways look at the imagery and texts of Christianity - think flock, righteous, sorrowful, and glorious. While you might suspect that this could take an irreverent turn, the works are subtle in their subversiveness.



Take Joyful Sorrowful Glorious pictured above, an installation of 50 knotted French knitted rosary beads, each one lightly shaded like different batches of linen. It's austere and monastic yet of course made from wool it's also soft, and the crucifixes tangling from each set of beads, strangely figurative.

Making "Dark Matter Blue Noise"

Sandra Schmidt's quiet assemblages in Dark Matter Blue Noise vibrate and count. They recall vibrations and musical notation, and sounds echoed while the universe was creating itself.



But there's also architecture and a feeling for transcribed music and archives of images...