John Roy and his Hybrids

Are they buildings? Trophies to the instability of aesthetics? John Roy calls them Hybrids. They've started out as people and in the alchemy of art, transmuted into buildings. On each side where the base meets the buildings are a set of hands and feet as a reminder. John's signature holes perforate almost all the Hybrids along with formalist bands of colour. The largest Hybrid here suggests the Empire State building, while the one next to it, a mosque or perhaps the Chrysler building.

Lonnie Hutchinson & Hand Maid in Mt Albert

Lonnie Hutchinson's work often carries a sub-text. It's only apparent here in the title - Hand Maid in Mt Albert - and perhaps in the doily like shapes of some of the cut-outs that make up this installation. It's a subtext about the place of Polynesian women in contemporary society, about 'craft' (that much disputed word), about sculpture, about applied art. In this work, the notion of sculpture is ephemeral and fragile - with implied movement and a lightness of touch.

Home Base

Home Base includes new work by Margaret Dawson printed on silver trays. Above is The Next Stage 2008 - essentially an image of a woman with a jersey over her head but emerging from a deep silver dish coated so that she glows. Margaret often uses people she knows in her work and this woman is her mother, Anna. But it's not essential to know this and Anna is transformed into a image with non specific historic references, of forbearance and saintliness.

A Guilty Party

"Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the world? With our voracious appetites, we have gnawed, devoured, scoffed, gutsed, chomped, gobbled, trampled, polluted, desecrated the world. Who ate all the world? We did! Pass me those antacids - this heartburn/break is killing me!"
Lauren Lysaght, Oct 2008

A Guilty Party is featured in Home Base.

Collecting Art

"The best advice I can give a collector is: develop your eye, and then buy with your heart - always, always with the heart."
Andre Emmerich (1924-2007), 2003

Simon Shepheard and the demolition of NZ landscape

We asked Simon Shepheard about the ideas behind Pimp My Planet on at the gallery until 4 October.

MNG: Visitors to the exhibition often ask where you get your materials?

SS: My immediate environment- Grey Lynn, Ponsonby. It lies on the verge outside half renovated villas, and as I go around on other business, I can't resist stacking the roof racks or loading the back of the wagon. I collect, sort, & store the materials to renovate my studio/house as well as build art.

MNG: Why make work from these kinds of materials?

SS: This country used to be a rainforest. Huge trees, often over 1000 years old pretty well covered the land coast to coast. Then it was mass-mangled into villas by our immediate ancestors, painted with generations of toxic colour, lashed by storms and blistered by the sun. And then thrown out onto the road. So the narrative's implicit, I'm just the editor.

MNG: You seem to like paua....

SS: Paua has a parallel tale. Its cultural relevance is cross-myriad. The radium powered gleam redeems the low caste context it is set into. I like to use it as a brush stroke of neon pigment.

MNG: Your work seems to think about our landscape tradition. Anything you want to say about that? Has your work always been about landscape?

SS: Yes. It's powerful subject matter and seems to emerge almost uninvited out of the blistered, peeling planks. NZ is not the centre of the post-modern world - its a big empty landscape on the edge of it. What is happening to the Amazon now, happened here a hundred years ago. In many ways Kiwis are the biggest polluters ever on earth, and yet we deceive the world into believing that we're exactly the opposite. Landscape glorification is our most dubious art. I think I'm having a poke at all that, but I also see the scapes struggle to survive as poignant, beautifully sad, and worth revealing.

MNG: What is it with the signs? What are they about?

SS: Of course they are a cheap metaphor! They mock real-estate or street signs - hacked and pilfered souvenirs from a sick future. They are a seductive warning pointing down the road to a beautiful death.

Green Ghost

I'm looking at Green Ghost (above) by Simon Shepheard. It's inlaid paua hole and tree stump glitter under the gallery lights. Nevermind the paua, the dead tree stump is such a familiar image, but not only that, it has a history in New Zealand art. Simon talks about referencing Dick Frizzell but Frizzell was certainly sending up a whole tree stump tradition. The Dead Tree Theme in New Zealand art lives on.