Exhibitions
Sunday February 17, 2007
Just Hanging around
Four Winds- a Report
Kia ora tatou:
Well, the work of the last few months has come to an end. Four Winds is now officially open and my residency comes to a close soon.
The last few weeks have been hectic, to put it mildly. When I first moved here, we looked for an exhibition space. The only one was Forry’s, the bar/cafe/bistro across the road. Then we came across the rail shed, a goods unloading facility behind the town. The local Lions chapter had been using it to store a collection of vintage farm tractors, The interior was dirty, the rafters decorated in birdsh*#, and the wind blew in through cracks in the walls. In addition, it had no lighting to speak of. But the possibilities were there. Somehow I thought that my white-framed images could look really stand-out in such an…er..industrial setting. So we made the decision to go with it.
Over the last few weeks the Lions of Maniototo have been hard at work. They have moved the tractors, steam-cleaned the exhibition space, and one of their members, Wally MacIntyre, has been hard at work, putting in lighting for me. Nothing has been a problem for them.
The framed work arrived on Wednesday from Christchurch and we moved into gear on Thursday am.
As you will see from the pictures, one of the first problems to solve was how to hang the works; there was no slick suspension system such as is found in galleries. A local farmer and good friend, George Lindsay, turned up with a coil of #10 wire and fence strainer, and rigged a wire along the top of the wall. Somehow the agricultural nature of the suspension system fitted in perfectly with the venue and the theme of the show. Ranfurly is, after all, a rural service town… We made hooks from 16ga lacing wire and hung the works on these with cable ties, which allowed us to get the levels correct. A builder’s laser level made this a lot more convenient. George then found some bales of hay which have become seats for people to sit on if they want to spend time with the work. The final agricultural touch was some bundles of freshly-cut barley to mark out the entrance to the exhibition space. The draughts in the building meant going around the outside and pulling the holes with duct tape.
On Friday we finished hanging and adjusting levels and spacing of the work. Wally came in and rigged the lighting to suit the positioning of the framed images. Then disaster struck. One of the big works had come down unsigned (a last-minute reprint and frame job). When I went to take it out of its frame, the glass broke! After a few very rude words, I went in search of a glass service (I didn’t even know if Ranfurly had one!). I was in luck. The local paint-and-hardware shop came to the rescue. I didn’t realise how lucky I was-the glass guy is usually away home by this time, but yesterday his children arrived home early so he had decided to stay at work a little longer. Phew!
We were still printing catalogues 30 minutes before the show opened, and the final touches were made with minutes to spare. If you want to have a look at the works, visit the Maniototo album in the landscapes section of this website.
Around 100 people came to the opening and it was really great to have friends turn up from as far away as Christchurch, Dunedin and Te Anau.
A big thank you to Jude, George, Linda, Lesley, Gavin, Bec and Amie (and a lot of others) for helping make the show happen.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Going to a hanging
Kia ora tatou:
A few notes:
Hanging an exhibition has always been a really nerve-wracking thing for me. Wairua was no different.
We head out to the gallery with the framed pictures carefully swaddled in bubblewrap, driving like geriatrics and angering other roadusers.
Tough.
The next step is to sort the photographs into a coherent order, so the show becomes a whole and makes sense.
Another hour gone.
Then the exhaustive and exhausting business of getting htem on the wall at millimetrically precise intervals and heights.
Another 3 hours’
Finally the last few details. Catalogues and cards ( what have I forgotten) and back home for a quick shower and get ready.
Then the opening. fear and elation( will it be well-received?)
But the kicker is the next day. I thought it was just me, but friends who have exhibited all talk of hitting the ground with a thud and going flat the day after. You tend to wonder what you hae actually achieved. But the satisfaction begins to return after a day or so.
For those of you off-shore, here are a few photographs from the hanging.
Enjoy.
Ka kite ano
Wairua-the exhibition
Kia ora tatou:
People often ask me what I see in the landscape, what it means to me, what the theme of my work is. For a long time I have felt that this country has a uniquely mystical side to it, a quality that is somehow other. Maori have a word that somehow sums it up.
Wairua.
Loosely translated, the word means spirit but, like so many words in Maori, contains layers of meaning and significance. It’s the spirit of a place, but it’s more than that. Sense of place can come from the things that are there, the buildings, people, structures, landforms and the interrelationship between them. That is the approach Robin Morrison took. Wairua contains more than that; it contains the idea of a mystical presence that dwells in the land and informs all, that affects the way people live and the way that they feel.
I have noticed that New Zealand film seems to have this unique darkness, a sense of something else. Vincent Ward’s Vigil is a case in point. All his movies, in fact, seem to have this quality. It is as if he is listening to a radio station unavailable to the rest of us. Snakeskin is another movie that springs to mind. Again that sense of a sinister supernatural infection. Even comedies like Goodbye Pork Pie and Came a Hot Friday have this same edginess. Sam Neill discusses this idea in his documentary Cinema of Unease. You might want to rent it and decide for yourself.
In my travels around New Zealand, working on White Cloud Silver Screen, I often wondered why this was (being on the road gives you a lot of time to think). I wondered what it was filmmakers saw that photographers did not. While the filmmakers seemed to have captured the essence (or inner sense) of our landscape, photographers are still heavily replicating an essentially European view of the landscape, a romantic pictorialism similar to that carried out by the English landscape artists of the 19th-century, who brought with them the watercolour aesthetic they had learned, and pasted it on the landscape in front of them. Bit by bit, day by day, as I considered this idea, I found it feeding into my photography and into the way I perceived the landscape and the feelings I began to have while being out in it.
Experiences in some of the forgotten, out-of-the-way corners of this country only served to reinforce it. Bad Blood, the story of Stan Graham, an ordinary man who went mad and shot a number of people, is a case in point. Down in the hills behind Hokitika, it was easy to imagine paranioa setting in as a result of being watched by a landscape that wore a perpetual scowl.
Out beyond the city limits, beyond the pressures of human existence, in the dark corners of this country (and they are there) are some very old stories waiting for listeners. Sometimes the stories are turbulent, sometimes serene. But they are there, if we are ready to listen.
Te Wairua o te whenua. The spirit of the land.
