Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky

Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky

The first chance to see Shane Cotton’s newest paintings at City Gallery Wellington.

During the 1990s Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi: Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) emerged as a provocative voice in New Zealand art. His detailed and probing paintings took his dual Pakeha and Māori heritage as a starting point and contributed to the debates around identity politics and biculturalism in New Zealand.

In the mid-2000s, however, Shane Cotton’s paintings changed. Instead of a concern with the land and its histories, Cotton turned his attention upwards, to the expansive canvas of the sky. Jettisoning many of his trademark images, removing all reference to stable horizons, and employing an uncanny, nocturnal palette of blue and black, Cotton opened up a new painted space—one that suggested both the outer spaces of science fiction and a mythic spirit realm or underworld.

The new exhibition Shane Cotton: The Hanging Sky is a journey through this distinctive airborne world, as Cotton has enlarged, explored and complicated it across six years of energetic art-making. On show at City Gallery Wellington from 15 June to 6 October 2013, the exhibition is a chance for New Zealand audiences to experience this period of change and transformation in the work of one of our country’s most esteemed painters. It contains many works never seen before in New Zealand.

The journey begins with Cotton’s blue-black skyscapes from 2006 and 2007, where ‘the ghosts of birds’—as poet Eliot Weinberger calls them—speed past spectral cliffs. In a nearby group of works, Cotton populates his skies with a collection of haunting faces, among them those of toi moko (Māori preserved heads) drawn from colonial photographs. A similar sense of unfinished business fires Cotton’s skyscapes from 2010, where competing biblical translations drift like smoke amidst a dogfight of shapes and symbols.

Finally, the major space in the exhibition presents Cotton’s newest works, among them a suite of large monoprints, begun at the Gottesman Etching Center in Israel, and another of painted baseball bats. Resembling targets arrayed on a rifle range and a line-up of elaborate weapons, these works pitch chromatic richness and decorative beauty against suggestions of conflict.

This unsettled quality sets the stage for the The Haymaker Series, a five-panel skyscape that jumps and pulses with an unprecedented variety of images, from Māori modernist carvings to Cotton’s now familiar birds and ‘marked heads’ through to paintgun-like splats of colour. As Paton observes, “far from summing things up or offering a neat conclusion, Shane’s newest skyscapes are spaces of experiment, change and play.”

City Gallery Wellington has had a long relationship with Shane Cotton. In 2002 the Gallery staged a ten year survey exhibition of the artist’s work. The new exhibition takes a different approach. It is not a full survey show but a succinct and lively presentation of Cotton’s freshest work. It brings together skyscapes from the recent past with an almost equal number of new works, and, says curator Justin Paton, “places the emphasis firmly on the present tense.”

The Hanging Sky is organised by Christchurch Art Gallery in association with the Institute of Modern Art and curated by the Gallery’s Senior Curator Justin Paton. The exhibition has recently toured in Australia, where it was shown at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney. City Gallery Wellington is delighted to be the homecoming venue for the exhibition and the exhibition will be accompanied by a series of Matariki-related events.

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