Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to eyeCONTACT, a forum built to encourage art reviews and critical discussion about the visual culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. I'm John Hurrell its editor, a New Zealand writer, artist and curator. While Creative New Zealand and other supporters are generously paying me and other contributors to review exhibitions over the following year, all expressed opinions are entirely our own.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Exposed hides






Helen Calder: yellow orange red black
City Art Rooms
2 September – 26 September 2009

Here we have an unusual show of ‘paintings’ by Helen Calder. However first of all before I start, let me state that I show at City Art Rooms, that Calder is a personal friend, and that she was my co-dealer in Christchurch. So you can treat what I say with suspicion if you wish. That is perfectly understandable.

Yet see for yourselves. These works are very strange, like pelts or hides in a curing shed: smooth rubbery skins of thick chewy paint that glisten - and are covered with delicate striations, stretchmarks, flecks and wrinkles. They are spread over bending stainless steel rods held to the wall with small brackets. True fetish objects that are pure sensation, that you long to touch and rub up against. Each a beckoning surface that is about one and a quarter metres wide, that is almost without any support at all, that has nothing behind it – that is all surface.

Their being draped over the rods means that you can see two drooping, glossy, undulating planes: a near one with convex edges, the other distant surface with concave. And folds in the middle of the rod where the ‘fabric’ is bunched up to form a hint of a vertical line. Some lower edges have a little ribbonlike tail hanging loose.

For Calder these works seem wilder than what she normally presents. Looser figuratively and looser literally. From painted surfaces that have been flayed in some hideously gruesome ritual to extract a trophy. Bizarre animal parts of acrylic and enamel peeled off and left hanging out to dry.

2 comments:

gnute said...

"Here we have an unusual show of ‘paintings’ by Helen Calder. However first of all before I start, let me state that I show at City Art Rooms, that Calder is a personal friend, and that she was my co-dealer in Christchurch. So you can treat what I say with suspicion if you wish. That is perfectly understandable."

Hi John, perhaps this is a good chance to suggest that you actively invite other writers to review a show whenever there is a conflict of interest.

Calder's paintings here remind me of something Rohan Weallans said in a talk years ago; how paint that escapes from its support is very much like the toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - paint remains as paint in the 'real' world.

Lydia Chai

John Hurrell said...

That is a beaut quote from Rohan,Lydia. Wonderful.

Well I wrote about this show because I feel it is unusual and of public interest. However I might be mistaken, and biased - but if that is the case, sceptics can tell me so.

Anyway I hope to bring other writers on board eyeCONTACT very soon, to get a better spread of opinion and to examine shows in other cities. However writers like to carefully pick what exhibitions to discuss, though I might perhaps suggest.