Safe Places

12 September - 12 October 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

New Wellington Artists

Safe Places is the third exhibition in the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery’s annual series presenting work by emerging Wellington artists. Some of the artists in this show are at the very beginning of their exhibiting career, whilst others have a history of showing at experimental and artist-run galleries. The exhibition explores ‘safe places’—presenting art works which operate as spaces for playing, both for artist and audience. Generous and sincere, the works in Safe Places are also cunningly witty.

Designer Toshi Endo has long made Internet artworks in his spare time, but has only recently begun to exhibit them in galleries. The projected version of his web-based work Safeplaces provides the title for the exhibition as a whole, presenting a whimsical utopia, an animated environment which is operated by audiences via a computer mouse. Endo says he wants to ‘create safeplaces within the web…a place where people can escape all the rules and have some fun.’ In Endo’s world animals roam free, at one with humans, trees grow, the sun comes out, the day passes in a kind of beautiful dream. We are free to play as we wish, yet at the same time we are always mediated by the boundaries he has created: despite the apparent lack of rules he has ultimately set the limits of the world for us
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Clem Devine ’s work is wilfully self important, placing his own identity both as an artist and as a consumer under scrutiny in The 16th BMW Art Car, a photographic light-box work which refers to BMW’s promotional Art Cars, which were produced from the 1970s to the 1990s. The original Art Cars, painted and signed by artists of international fame, were described by BMW as creating ‘a gateway between art and racing.’ Fifteen cars in total were decorated, but Devine presents here the 16th—his own car, decorated through a computer illusion using the Photoshop programme. Revelling in a love affair with the urban boy’s playground of fast cars, and inserting himself without invitation into a canon of art stars, Devine’s 16th BMW Art Car is unashamedly brash and youthfully optimistic.

Shay Launder ’s installation Forgiveness Will Rise Up offers us nature by way of the local craft store, a handmade attempt at the perfection of geological phenomena. A larger-than-life felt boulder lies on the floor, its soft, furry surfaces just asking to be stroked. Three crystals nestle beneath like secret jewels, crafted from shimmery blue and green plastic, with holes cut into them so that they resemble Swiss cheese. Behind them a young woman mimics a deer, antlers fashioned from twigs held behind her head. Launder’s depiction of a mock landscape is both idealised, yet at the same time personalised in its idiosyncrasies.

Fiona Gillmore is interested in the everyday signs and billboards which brand our cities, their slogans helpfully exhorting us with instructions for living (or shopping). ‘Better Luck Next Time’ her work in Safe Places announces in a tone simultaneously both hopeful and resigned. Laid out in crisp black lettering on neon, it resembles a commercial lightbox which has been cast aside and abandoned, propped up on a pile of timber. Ironic, yet also wistfully earnest, Gillmore tracks an urban landscape in the era of instant consumer culture.


Emma Bugden
Exhibition Curator

Working across painting and sculpture, Chris Clements investigates the disciplines of archaeology and history, creating fictionalised narratives which draw on both colonial settlement and contemporary suburban life. In Safe Places he offers us shelter in works exploring housing and containment. A roughly constructed cave is made from wire and concrete, resembling something a child might create to play at keeping house in. A beautifully rendered model of a house, built from wallpaper and anchored by a lead sinker, accompanies a simple black and white drawing of a house in silhouette. Nostalgic without ever dipping into sentiment, Clements’s work evokes both personal and collective histories.