Maddie Leach - Gallery Seven (10,000 metres)

5 October - 4 November 2001 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Maddie Leach has had a ‘watery fascination’, as she puts it, for some time now. Aquariums, swimming pools and a recreational island-reserve, with a history as a leper colony, have found their way into her installations and photography. Her attention has recently turned to the ice-rink—which, like these other leisure sites, carries romantic associations of silence and idleness. With Gallery Seven (10,000 metres) Leach continues to investigate the merging of the sporting and the artistic, the public and the private, the performative and the contemplative.

The exhibition’s title refers to the speed-skating race of 10,000 metres (the maximum distance reserved for male skaters) and, with the gallery’s re-decoration as a corporate box or elite sports bar, it establishes the expectation that such an event is to be screened. But it’s as if the race is yet to begin, or as if it’s permanently intermission and someone has forgotten to switch off the camera. For instead of the athletic precision and physical perfection of professional skaters cutting the ice, flocks of scampering children and an amateur ice-dancing couple move in and out of view to the synthesised ’80s pop of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The public world of sports-watching has been seemingly replaced by a window into weekend activities on the ice, evoking, for those of the artist’s generation at least, childhood ice-parties or Saturday afternoons at ‘Skate World’ or ‘Paradise’.

Light nostalgia is disrupted, however, by the lone male skater who, lurking around the edges of the frame, skates with an almost obsessional focus. Witnessing his personal rhythm and psychological interiority induces a feeling of voyeurism as we, like the artist, watch him unobserved. Watching and being watched are significant elements in spending time at the ice-rink, and these activities are enhanced by the rink’s architecture and tiered seating. Leach draws attention to these processes of viewing through her use of various film techniques: cropping, slow motion and gradual fading between one sequence of images and the next. Complete with carpet and soft lighting, Gallery Seven is an oddly comfortable space for the leisurely activities of viewing and contemplation which occupy the gallery-goer.

 

Rebecca Wilson

Artist’s Biography

Born in 1970, Maddie Leach has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the University of Canterbury. She exhibits in artist-run spaces and public galleries throughout New Zealand. Earlier this year her photographic work was included in Parallel Worlds, a collaborative exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery of Victoria University, Wellington and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. In 2000 her work was included in Sister Spaces at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Maddie Leach lives in Wellington and teaches at Massey University.