The Chemistry of Three – New Artist Installation

The Chemistry of Three – New Artist Installation Projects

20th August – 7th October 2007

PAUL CULLEN – The Hall of Birds
HAMISH PALMER – Moss & Moss
NIKI HASTINGS McFALL – The Forest (Vao)

" The Chemistry of Three" brings together 3 major proponents of our contemporary visual culture in New Zealand who inhabit the 3 contiguous galleries of the art museum with wit and grace and an engaging sense of theatre. The artists were chosen to represent the breadth of installation art practice - a senior and internationally acknowledged Auckland 3D artist; Paul Cullen - a highly regarded Pacific Island/Aotearoa mid-career artist; Niki Hastings-McFall - and exciting emerging artist Hamish Palmer, whose family connections are from the Kaipara, Northland.

The artists create their own artistic commentaries in each of the 3 installations. As the curator, I did not want to impose a particular curatorial 'theme' to the exhibition or the artists. They were given 'free reign'. However there is an over-arching conceptual design in the show, a kind of 'ying & yang' balance of the museum spaces throughout, which will be immediately apparent. The exhibition design plays with the spacial concepts of 'white cube' and 'blackout space' at either end of the gallery. Paul Cullen's cerebral chairs are installed very precisely in their stark white cube space at one end, and Niki Hastings-McFall's forest of florid lamps are entered through heavy curtains to the black-out gallery space at the opposite end.

In between is Hamish Palmer's counterpoint commentary on the ubiquitous department store cosmetic counter!"

Scott Pothan, Curator

Paul Cullen.
The Hall of Birds. 2007.

Models are familiar to us as representations which make sense by addressing the existence of things outside themselves. Models can make visible the past, the future, the microscopic, the huge, and the imaginary, and a model may be a version which is at the same scale as the original, or it may be larger or smaller. In sculpture, models, maquettes, or mock-ups, represent an intermediate state which is the basis for a finished sculpture. In his sculptures the model is given autonomy as the end point of a constructional process. Each of the sculptures in this exhibition is a model-like construction assembled from already existing objects such as furniture, pencils, books, plastic fruit and rulers

Hamish Palmer
Moss & Moss

Natural History Beauty Therapy

Moss & Moss is an extension of Hamish Palmers recent practice which examines belief systems about nature through the historical continuum of nature based imagery.
Colonial settlers to New Zealand bought the genres of ‘the sublime’, ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the picturesque’ as frameworks through which to view the new landscapes. Ideologies inherent in these genres resonate throughout New Zealand art and visual culture to present day representations of nature in film, advertising and point of sale display in an ever expanding colour range that includes your perfect match.

Palmer’s recent process has involved recontexualisation of a selection of hand sized natural objects including kumara, birds nests and mossy twigs. Inverting the conduct of the historical genres, these small natural tools are employed as frameworks for exploring aesthetic archetypes drawn from visual culture.

Niki Hastings McFall

‘The Forest (Vao)’

The Forest (Vao)’ is a glowing cluster of flower-covered lamps -their shades, large and small be-decked in a colourful and floral Sunday best. The lampstands are all individual and unique - each one unaltered from the way they were found either in secondhand shops or on trade-me. This quirkiness underscores their individuality yet also their sameness. Like human beings they are all unique yet all share a communal commonality. They are all (obviously) lamps and they are all crowned with a halo of multi-hued radiance that is an expression of 'ubuntu'- kindness, generosity of spirit and humanity. The title is drawn from Samoan oratory. When Samoans gather from different parts of the islands - or in the case of modern Samoans like the artist herself, from different countries and continents - the talking chief’s welcoming speech will open: “Ua fuifui fa’atasi ae vao ‘ese’ese” … “We have gathered together from different parts of the forest”, a phrase that evokes a sense of a common humanity, whether Polynesian or Palagi, and from whichever part of the forest one might have come.

Chemistry of Three – New Artist Installation Projects

20th August – 7th October 2007

Curated by Scott Pothan

A catalogue and posters will support this exhibition

ENDS

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