Refresh - New Artists

4 October 2002 - 3 November 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Refresh is the second in an annual series of exhibitions in the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery that features work by emerging Wellington-based artists—new artists whose developing bodies of work reward close consideration. Although Refresh does not focus on a theme, the work presented here by John Lake, Phil Murray, Siv B. Fjærestad, Jason Secto and Pat Macan shares an attentiveness in approach, an interest in detail and texture.

John Lake’s quasi-scientific video Longer Whiter Cloud documents an eruption of shaving cream, as it flows like lava, mud or liquid marshmellow from its aerosol can. A play on ‘Aotearoa’, Longer Whiter Cloud alludes to myths of origin as well as geology and geography. Filmed straight-on, the work suggests an apparent objectivity—but its directness is mock-serious in tone, as a delight in the erupting cream’s textures and forms is most evident.

Phil Murray’s sculpture explores the qualities of different materials, manipulating inert materials to seem animate. The handrail cast in resin seems to be alive with worms tunnelling inside its curve, and the Edwardian mantelpiece cast in concrete is pocked and eaten as if the glowing corrosive detritus in the bottom of the insect-trap jar is leaking. Both Phil Murray and Siv B. Fjærestad are drawn to familiar objects and domestic fixtures that are evocative of security and a time past, remaking these objects with processes that emphasise materiality.

Fjærestad crochets everyday objects from fuse wire, a practice suggestive of craft traditions that value skill and care, that occupy the hands while allowing the mind to drift elsewhere. Her sculptures are objects of personal significance and comfort, and in their crocheted delicacy and slightly unravelled state they evoke a ‘modern nostalgia’, as she puts it. Fjærestad is Norwegian and these works demonstrate her interest in cultural dislocation, how memory and notions of home become infused into everyday objects.

Seen up close Fjærestad’s crocheted wire has a scribble-like quality that visually echoes the concentrated intricacy of Jason Secto’s painting and the quality of ‘handmadeness’ in Pat Macan’s large-scale drawings. Secto’s abstracted forms fuse the organic and the mechanical, exploring the hybridisation of the human and non-human. Painted on doors left slightly ajar to represent the fluid, threshold status of such forms and technologies, these works explore the capacity for intervention into the human body that has long intrigued humankind and is now even more pertinent with 21st century technologies.

Pat Macan’s drawings depict a futuristic landscape of colossal rollercoasters whose disintegrating structures are in places supported by little more than gaping holes of air. Individual works are named after characters from seminal 20th century literature—Red Haired Mary after an addict in William S. Burroughs’ book Junky whose bones are slowly dissolving, Nately after a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 whose idealistic faith in America receives a shattering. Drawn in oil stick on opened-out cardboard boxes, Macan’s imposing works are themselves likely to be susceptible to decomposition over time.

Rebecca Wilson