Sam Mitchell's Secrets

We asked Sam Mitchell this week about her work in Rulers. She talked about her favourite painting subjects and other topics...

MNG: In your new series of work in Rulers you have a mixture of contemporary and historic subject matter. How do you choose your subjects? What interests you about particular subjects?

SM: The choice of subject matter for my works comes from spending hours in libraries and secondhand bookstores, finding images that stick in my mind. The image of Abe Lincoln for example, his face in most photographs is unsettling and graphically interesting, with all his creases, and a splattering of facial hair. He is unusual looking unkempt, bedraggled and disheveled.

The images selected tie in with reoccurring themes in my works - my interest in 'place of origin', being separated from a sense of place, and the idea of an internal narrative.

MNG: Often you make similar images of your subjects, but load them with different "tatoos"? What's your thinking there?

SM: By using tattoos in my work (historically used by tribal nations as identification of place, tribe, family - a skin record/passport of who you were) I create falsehoods mixed in with little bits of truths. Personal, cultural, and historical details provided by the tatoos create the internal narrative of my chosen subject and leave the viewer with a mixed history of a real person.

MNG: Everyone marvels at the skill of the arcylic on perspex works (example pictured above) - of working from back-to-front? What do you like about this technique and media?

SM: The technique of reverse painting is not a new one (Warwick Brown told me so). I enjoy the finished plastic result - you don't actually see what you are painting on to the perspex until you turn it over. So it is not instant like usual ways of painting. The first marks are the last marks - they are not the building up of layers as with a traditional oil painting. My process is more like printmaking - the use of line then the after thought of colour and tone to describe the form.

MNG: Can you say something about your collaboration with Gavin Hurley? (See images in previous post below).

SM: This is a very easy process....Gavin provides me with a collage and I have the freedom usually unedited to add to it.

We work so differently, Gavin is tidy and organised, and his work reflects this sense of order. So I am honored to be able to disrupt the order and add some twisted sense of chaos to his so perfectly cut and neat collages.

Our collaborations I think work really well. The collage is complete in as far as Gavin is concerned when he hands it over to me. He never really knows what the original work will come back looking like, and I have no preconceived idea of what I will add to the work. So it really is a surprise to us both when the collaborative work is revealed.

Rulers

Sam Mitchell and Gavin Hurley are currently showing at the gallery in their exhibition Rulers. Sam and Gavin were at art school together and have continued their association with some collaborative works (pictured: Nobody 2009 top, JFK Junior 2009 bottom).

History Painting

Victor Berezovsky's paintings bear the marks of undercutting, carving, underpainting, and chiselling. The artist as archeologist digs into their surfaces to uncover their hidden layers, and create organic histories.

The surface of the paintings record this process and also respond to it.

Victor Berezovsky's "Splinter"

Mary Newton Gallery recently talked to Victor Berezovsky about his latest work in Splinter. The exhibition comprises nine paintings on marine hoop pine that are painted, carved into, chiselled, cut, and drilled.

MNG: Your work used to be quite figurative but has slowly become more abstract. What interests you about abstraction?

VB: Yes it’s true that on the face of it my work has become more “abstract”. However I would say that my position has always been one of abstracting rather than heading towards the abstract. For me the term abstract is an absolute and near impossible position.

Ilam taught in a modernist tradition. Therefore underpinning all of my work are formal and plastic considerations. However in relationship to this are ‘figurative’ possibilities or dialogues. Over the years I have processed and abstracted from life. This process of drawing in and out has been cyclic.

These days the way I draw in new information has become more subtle and vague. Currently I need less concrete stimulus for the works to develop. In this sense the works are more abstract. Also I think it is easier for viewers of my current work to place the work as abstract as it definitely overlaps with visual language previously used or assigned to abstraction.

I would hope however that viewers review my current work in light of what has gone before it. It is the ability of this current work to echo and resonate with this past that interests me.



MNG: Your previous series, Dacha, incorporated drilled holes in patterns and added playful elements to the surface. This new work has a lot of cutting, drilling, chiselling and general attacking of the surfaces. The chiselling and chipping away of the wood lends texture as well as a painterly aspect to the process - is this your intent or what was your intention?

VB: When I first started the wood paintings for Dacha I initially set out to respond to the grain of the wood as it was pretty beautiful. The marks also reminded me of my visceral stained sheet works done in 2000. However I quickly found the results to be contrived and constraining in developing forms.

By chance a solution was brought about by finding a box of wooden peg board toys. I spend a period of time drawing on these objects and then set about drilling up the unresolved wood stretchers in a similar fashion. They immediately set up a modernist framework against the organic markings.

I liked the idea of subverting this framework by sticking wooden pegs into it or by painting the surface. In this sense the holes became architectural anchor points from which I set about contradicting or reinforcing. Importantly the holes also gave me a tool to refresh the surface when it became too skin-like or rigid due to using acrylic paint.

In a similar fashion the cuts of the new work have partially being used as a tool to refresh the surface. Sometimes I would erase what was there and sometimes it was used to make form directly. A similar approach was used in my “Marked” series in 2003. The use of cutting or scoring was employed at different times in the history of the work. The marks became imbedded into the surface and often these marks or colours were dug out or raised to the surface latter depending on what the works needed. A friend aptly used the word “accrued” to describe how forms are made in my works. I think this is a very good word to summarize the Splinter works.

MNG: Can you say something about the imagery? It's quite hard-edged but dissolves and becomes more organic in places?

VB: As some of the titles of the works suggest, the works contain or trace a level of struggle in achieving their shape. At times I found myself lost and then suddenly a single decision brought a clear and definite surge to a conclusion. What is it that determines this final point? I would say that is no one thing determined it. Rather it was the embodiment of all the working that had gone into making the history of the work.

History is often related by certain key images or symbols. These images sit at the surface of the event though their making is often underscored by the smaller events that have unfolded beneath its surface. I suppose I wanted my work to contain this meshing and rupturing of surface and show what lay beneath it.

In terms of the shapes that make up or comprise my work I would say they are a synthesis or echoing of prior forms - that is, the more organic Grotto series and the more structural Bobble series.

MNG: And the palate? What was your thinking behind the choice of colours, this exploration of greys?

VB: I usually work in high key colours when starting a work. However in the end I slowly introduced greys to subdue the palate and isolate areas of colour. I suppose in some ways the grey conveys a slightly industrial feel to the work which in turn is reinforced by the more structural forms and holes.

When I started this series I was reading about how the gulag system in the Soviet Union was used to mine regions. At some point I introduced gold and silver in response. I liked the idea of embedding these precious metals into the layers of the work and then at some point striping them back.

The scale of the problem

Gina Matchitt's large scale fast food-shaped works in Sweet'n'Sour hint at issues. She is currently living in America where super-size is the norm for everything including the people. And of course it is impossible to walk the streets of New Zealand without seeing the impact of fast-food here, to say nothing of the health problems caused by diabetes etc etc.

The two works pictured above, Large Fries and Pipi and Marinara, feature images of fresh food and the Maori boil-up, and shell fish and pasta respectively.

Gina residency last year at Centre d’Art Marnay just outside of Paris focused on food culture. She considered the relationship that cultures (in this case French) that retain their lands have with their food culture, comparing this to the Maori experience. She found that even fast food in France is reasonably high quality.

In Happy Meal pictured below, Gina weaves together these two food cultures into the shape of a Happy Meal container. The imagery of kumara blends with a vegetable dish in half the work, and a boil-up with cherries in the other half. The boil-up and kumara become fragmented by the weaving but the cherries and vegetables hold their own.

But then I have been sitting opposite the work for the past month considering its meaning, and dreaming of summer fruits... food imagery is potent overall.

Dying for a feed

Gina Matchitt's latest exhibition at the gallery Sweet'n'Sour includes some of her trademark techniques - componentry arranged in traditional Maori patterns - but also branches off in new directions.

Works like Fries Template and Cheese Royale take the shape of flattened fast food packages. Fries Template (pictured above) weaves together pasta labels and images of cherries, shell fish, and Maori potatoes using a template for a fries package as its title suggests.

It brings together these ingredients in a metaphor for cooking itself. But the overall impression is of a shroud - a reminder of the double-edged sword that eating has become.

Cheese Royale on the other hand (pictured below) engages with magazine food imagery. There's fancy French cheeses and salami and terrines woven together with images of the boil-up - not often seen in Vogue entertaining.

Sealed in a bell jar

Areta Wilkinson's Poi Girl series features silhouettes of the artist - notionally brooches - presented in bell jars. Poi Girl VIII (pictured above) sees Areta in profile tending a campfire. The metaphor of the campfire has appeared in a number of works, and her latest exhibition Waka Huia features the one pictured below as a brooch.

Called Areta's ahi kaa this work references the Maori metaphor of ahi kaa or keeping the home fires burning, the cultural fires fed, and the ancestral lands cared for.

Poi Girl VIII see Areta's literally tending the ahi kaa - maintaining and acknowledging her Ngai Tahu ancestry, but also her artistic heritage as a jeweller.