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There's a new
show in town. Bright Paradise,
the first instalment of the Auckland
Triennial, opens simultaneously at
Auckland Art Gallery, Artspace and
University of Auckland Art Gallery. The
show includes some 30 artists, with
around 10 coming from overseas. Artspace
is showing four artists: Paul Morrison,
Paul Sietsema, Ian McDonald and Tony De
Lautour. Artspace director Robert
Leonard says: "We're pleased to be
in on Bright Paradise. Galleries
tend to work independently, so it's good
to be pitching in to pull off something
really big. It's great that the
Triennial will have an expanded presence
in Auckland."
British
artist Paul Morrison paints his
cut-and-paste pastoral idyll on canvas
or massively enlarged on the wall in
black on white. Morrison's imagery has a
found, generic feel: he scours botanical
guides, children's storybooks and
cartoons for source material. Tree,
flower, fence and field motifs are
arranged to create impossible hybrid
scenes. Referencing Pop art, Op art,
Disney, neo-romantic bookplate
illustrations, and Aubrey Beardsley
graphics, Morrison's trippy Pop
landscapes flirt with abstraction - they
are riddled with formal conceits. A
precise realistic silhouette will sit
next to a stylised logo. Foliage and
wood grain swirl in dizzying Op Art
patterns. Havoc is played with scale and
distance. His bucolic scenes look like
backgrounds for cel animations, waiting
for the action to be added. You expect
Elmer Fudd to walk on at any moment.
Pointedly, sections of fence frame or
obscure views of the landscape, adding
to the sense that we are looking at a
contrived, commodified form of nature.
The wilderness has been tamed into a
synthetic experience - a themepark.
Morrison's hallucinated, fantasy
environments pivot between innocence and
malevolence in the blink of an eye.
Contrived
and artificial nature is the ostensible
subject matter of L.A. artist Paul
Sietsema's 1998 work Beautiful Place,
a 19-minute 16mm movie. Eight vignettes
present artificial flowers and gardens
the artist meticulously constructed in
his studio from paper, foam, wire and
paint. Flowers may be loaded subject
matter - symbols of purity, sex and
death - but the film is not really about
flowers. Rather it is a serene formal
exercise that uses images of an
artificial botany to reflect on vision,
time and representation. Giovanni Intra
describes the work as a "minuscule
epic". Bruce Hainley calls it
"a botanical autopsy of the
imaginary".
Bright
Paradise
addresses paradise lost as much as
found. Christchurch's Tony De Lautour's
"revisionist history"
paintings are naive antique-shop
landscapes overrun by an imagined cast
of characters. At the heart of their
sylvan glades or on their ferny
riverbanks, we often find a map of New
Zealand as an open grave. Cut deep into
the soil, De Lautour's death maps of
national history are surrounded by human
bones, as though the whole country were
still participants in psychic if not
actual cannibalism.
Alongside
them, Ian McDonald's photographs of
beached whales, dead and decomposing on
Muriwai beach from the late 1970s, read
as indices of social and psychic trauma.
Bright
Paradise
at Artspace (March-April 2001): Tony De
Lautour, Ian McDonald, Paul Morrison,
Paul Seitsma (at Artspace); curated by
Allan Smith; a joint project with
Auckland Art Gallery and University of
Auckland Art Gallery; with support from
Creative New Zealand, Chartwell Trust,
The Sue Fisher Art Trust, IFA, The
British Council, City Life and Aalto
Colour
For
further information contact Robert
Leonard or Sonya Korohina at Artspace:
phone (9) 3034965, e-mail
artspace@artspace.org.nz
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