Idyll

Idyll features a selection of works including painting, video, photography, and sculptural objects. The installations by object artists, Warwick Freeman, and, Joe Sheehan, are evocative reminders of the geology underneath us, and our various interactions with the land. Freeman’s Handles, (2009) celebrate the hand of the maker, presenting finely detailed facsimiles of tool handles that could have emerged from any grandfathers well stocked garage workshop. Sheehan’s work, The Quick and the Dead (Suite 3), (2013) meanwhile, recreates in perfect detail that ‘tool’ of 20^th century leisure, the television remote control. Presented in the same manner as museum ‘taonga’ both makers works, made from New Zealand stone, are at once potent and witty social commentary.

Ruth Cleland has risen to national prominence as an artist-documenter of Hamilton’s contemporary urban sprawl. A recent series by Cleland, entitled Island, (2012) comprises a selection of photorealist drawings and painting compositions from the many newly birthed suburban traffic islands in the outskirts of Hamilton. Cleland’s ‘islands’ capture the newness of our growing nation, and perhaps also represent microcosms of the New Zealand archipelago, increasingly mapped out and repurposed for domestic and commercial purposes.

While Cleland investigates New Zealand’s contemporary urban landscape, works by Garry Currin, Landscape without Von Tempskey, (2009) and Land Transport, (2006) by Roger Mortimer, reference the nineteenth century colonial surveyor-painters, who captured visions of the nation around the time the ‘New Zealand Company’ was acquiring and on selling land. In Currin’s haunting and windswept composition, a single, oppressive row of fence posts dissects the landscape. In Mortimer’s desolate landscape, a feline prowls the foreground, while words borrowed from twenty-first century vehicle registration correspondence are deposited in a heavy-handed gothic typeface. In a large format painting by Adrian Jackman, Detail, (2009) the vast canvas combined with vigorous and skillful application of acrylic emulsion, serve as a distraction to an extent that the composition almost becomes an abstraction. This topographical landscape originated from a ‘Google Earth’ satellite image captures the patterns formed by agricultural irrigation.

A painting by Johanna Pegler, Landed, from Āwhitu, (2010) resembles a visual analogy to the ‘pastoral idyll’ poem. The scene represented could be anywhere in old England. That is, until one discovers the tree in the centre of this magnificent (New Zealand) landscape grew from a seed deposited by a settler. The New Zealand natural landscape has of course been photographed countless times. The work of Mark Adams, and, Allan McDonald, is related to this tradition. Whereas most landscape photography is centred on the great beauty of our wild landscape, the works of these significant photographers reflect upon the effects colonisation has had on our environment, and on Māori history.

In Clinton Watkins video and sound loop, Landscape Distortions, (2011) filmed footage of the New Zealand landscape becomes literally distorted by sound. Watkins’ film and its soundtrack, composed using analogue synthesisers are fed through a sound and audio processing unit. Watkins likens his process to painting. Landscape Distortions has a haunting and experiential presence; the soundtrack drowning out the visual landscape is analogous to pollution.

We have all grown up within New Zealand’s newly pastoral landscape. As depicted through the eyes of these artists, it is no surprise perhaps that their New Zealand is not ‘100% pure’. Our agriculturally dominated landscape has of course been the key to our economic development as a nation and it will always retain countless pockets of beauty. However no one could argue that our landscape has not been savoured, mined, farmed, and lamented.

Matt Blomeley, November 2013

Idyll

9 November – 21 December 2013

Curated by Matt Blomeley

The New Zealand Steel Gallery

 Franklin Arts Centre, Pukekohe

Artists: Mark Adams | Ruth Cleland | Gary Currin | Warwick Freeman | Adrian Jackman | Allan McDonald | Roger Mortimer | Johanna Pegler | Joe Sheehan | Clinton Watkins

Idyll would not have been possible without the support of: Anna Miles Gallery, Matthew and Alison Bradbury, Two Rooms, Tim Melville Gallery, Melanie Roger Gallery, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Starkwhite, Whitespace Contemporary Art, and the help of Matt Henry, Tim Chapman, Eimi Tamua.