Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » SQUARE2 Archive » Amy Howden-Chapman
Amy Howden-Chapman
16 January - 13 February 2011 in the Square² Gallery
The Drain Lake Project is a 16mm film transferred to DVD that documents a familiar scene: friends and families sitting in a public park picnicking and sharing space on a clear day. The location depicted is Elysian Park in Los Angeles, the city where New Zealand artist Amy Howden-Chapman is currently based while studying at the prestigious California Institute of the Arts.
This film documents Howden-Chapman’s contribution to an ongoing collaborative project, known as The Elysian Park of Modern Museum Art (www.epmoa.org), initiated by a group of local artists who used the park as a starting point for making work. The various projects that comprise Elysian Park of Modern Museum Art aim to translate the conventional functions of museums and art galleries to a different type of public space by documenting and using the park as a site for exhibitions.
Elysian Park borders the artist’s neighbourhood of Echo Park, and is used by a cross section of the inhabitants of its surrounding neighbourhoods. On the weekend there are large groups barbequing, playing mariachi music on boom boxes, and cheering on children whacking piñatas hung from the trees. In this work we see these groups brought together as a community sharing space. However, in Howden-Chapman’s film the only sound audible is that of the ‘Lake’s Voice’ which presents a deeply eerie commentary on the invisible history of the physical site.
The event depicted is an ‘Audio Picnic’, organised by Howden-Chapman. At the picnic a boom box was placed in the centre of the space, drawing attention to a drain-way running through the park. Playing a repeated narration by the ‘Voice of the Lake’, the script and the voice reading it invoke lush running water, something largely absent from the arid Los Angeles environment.
In this film and the publication that accompanied the Drain Lake Project Howden-Chapman uses the language of documentation, home movies and advertising pamphlets to consider aspects of Los Angeles which are often ignored. Here the focus is the unremarkable infrastructure of a drain, and the way in which those who use the park personalise public space.
Included in the publication were a series of poems by Wellington writer Airini Beautrais. Written in response to images of Elysian Park, the poet recalls her own memories of paths and parks on travels around New Zealand and Europe, granting those who read the poems in Elysian Park the opportunity of comparing the particularities of that site with other parks from around the world.
Howden-Chapman’s practice centers around performance, using researched scripts, choreography and elaborately crafted settings to consider various cultural scenarios. Her works engage in subject matter ranging from urban design and infrastructure, to regional pride as embodied in craft and symbolism, to the public relations of environmental regulation and reform.
The artist has a Masters degree in Creative Writing (2005) and an Honours degree in Art History (2006), both from Victoria University of Wellington. She is part of a performance duo with Biddy Livesey known as Raised By Wolves. Other recent solo projects include: The Elysian Park Museum of Art’s History of Climate Change, A Guided Tour of the Collection, Elysian Park, Los Angeles (2010) and Chasing Loses, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2010). In 2008, Howden-Chapman was commissioned by City Gallery Wellington to produce The Flood, My Chanting for the One Day Sculpture series (for more information see: www.citygallery.org.nz/one-day-sculpture-project).
AMY HOWDEN-CHAPMAN
16 January–13 March 2011
Drain Lake Project 2010
DVD
Duration: 4:23 minutes, looped
Courtesy of the artist