Publication
2011
Authors: Emily Cormack, Amita Kirpalani, Charlotte Huddleston, Helen Johnson, David Thomas.
Artists: Damiano Bertoli, Julian Dashper, Richard Frater, Starlie Geikie, Maddie Leach, Simon Morris, Campbell Patterson, Hanna Tai, Mimi Tong, Jake Walker.
Curatored by Emily Cormack, Charlotte Huddleston, Amita Kirpalani
18.03.11 – 16.04.11
This catalogue was published on the occasion of the group exhibition Reason and Rhyme. Bringing together ten leading contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand the exhibition investigates the urge to structure and channel creative production through systems, grids and frameworks.
The artists in Reason and Rhyme are connected through their use of manifestos, seriality, diagrams and systems, with the exhibition exploring the points where creativity tangles with these parameters, coursing along the edges of grids, and submitting to the regimens of form and the statutes of regulated patterns.
The exhibition will explore the urge to locate oneself within the map or the doctrine, and to impose rules and structures across creative practice. It will investigate how these systematic devices both contain and channel creative enterprise, as well as plotting and contextualising it. Reason and Rhyme investigates how these parameters offer something from which to push up against - a structure to rebel from – when there is nothing left to rebel against.
Through applying ‘objective’ systems over creative processes each of the artists in Reason and Rhyme distinguishes, articulates or uncovers their content. Whether this pull towards systems and frameworks is a by-product of the reduced status of the object in contemporary art, or a result of the general tendency towards deconstruction within creative practice, each of these artists enlists a rigidity to give form to their ideas.
The exhibition features key works by New Zealand artist Julian Dashper, who is well known for his address of the perspectives of distance – geographical and conceptual – and employment of abstraction as a language to reflexively plot his presence within the frameworks of art and its history. Likewise Australian artist Damiano Bertoli draws on a specific period in history – the 1960s – pulling content from this era of turbulent social revolution and anchoring it within infinite yet decontextualising grids.
Wellington based artist Simon Morris employs formal painterly systems for his large-scale wall works that respond to the connotations of a site’s architecture and function. Similarly Mimi Tong’s sculptural reconfigurations of space employ specific formulae and sets of rules that guide the formation of her spatial responses.
Australian painter Jake Walker’s work depicts an uncomfortable collision between surreal subjective landscapes that are then abutted against the formal framing of late modernist architecture. Whereas Australian artist Starlie Geikie uncovers the latent hard-edge Modernist tendencies alive within craft practices such as quilting, crochet and weaving.
This exhibition will be accompanied by artist talks and a forum discussing the relationship between Systems and Creative Production. The outcomes from these discussions will then be employed to form the shape and structure of the second exhibition that opens at ST. PAUL St, Auckland on 29 September 2011. Coinciding with this exhibition in New Zealand we will publish a major exhibition catalogue documenting the exhibitions, discussion process and the final outcomes of this project.
This project has received support from Creative New Zealand.