Paul Nache

JOHN PULE JOHN WALSH 4-26 January 2013 @PAULNACHE

IMG X Tom Teutenberg

JOHN PULE JOHN WALSH

4-26 January 2013

_______________________________________________________

One late art-filled night in 2008, artists John Pule and John Walsh found themselves, by chance, at Pule’s Auckland studio. Swapping stories over a glass of wine quickly turned to swapping paintbrush strokes on a canvas, sparking the beginnings of a lengthy collaborative process that would see the pair travel back and forth between Auckland and Walsh’s studio in Wellington over the course of several months. The resultant painting, Untitled (2008), features a signature Walsh blue-green expressionist landscape, but unlike his usual modus operandi it does not envelope the entire canvas, here it is isolated, contained like an island floating alongside one of Pule’s emblematic cloud forms. As a backdrop to this scene, Pule’s drape-like vines swing down from the skies, while spectral beings and various anthropomorphic creatures populate the foreground. In a clearing on Walsh’s island a group of these beings gather, while others busy themselves like insects flying in and out of Pule’s vines. From below all this action a large kupenga, net, swoops down from the island seemingly fishing for souls, adding to this sense of action and festivity. Finding a mechanism through which to marry two seemingly disparate art practices can be a difficult negotiation, but through this process Pule and Walsh have been able to uncover commonalities that many people, including the artists themselves, may not have been aware existed in terms of both painterly practices and conceptual thinking. Ideas of belonging to nature, to the land and sea, movement and migration, mythologies and re-imagined histories are all recurrent themes in their respective artistic oeuvres. Spirits, demons and demi-gods float effortlessly across the canvas, interacting with mortal beings, watching over us, guiding us and at times devouring us spiritually. Pule’s oft used quotation of Christian iconography signals an interest in religion, not as a man of the cloth, but as a believer in the destructive nature of losing faith in customary knowledge and ways of thinking, of the dangers of looking at the Pacific and Pacific stories through Western eyes.  His works are submerged within the oral and human histories of Oceania, played out through a matrix of hiapo (Niuean barkcloth) based designs that he rightfully takes possession of as his birthright to adapt, develop and extend the artistic history and stories of Niue. Similarly Walsh often speaks of revisiting so called Māori ‘mythologies’ which were once widely held to be true accounts of history, most commonly being ancient stories retold by his Te Aitanga a Hauiti ancestors in the Tairawhiti region of New Zealand. Unlike the word ‘legend’ which refers to a significant historical event or achievement, the problem Walsh says with the term ‘mythology’ is that it implies that such accounts are fictitious and does not allow room to consider the esoteric or metaphorical data lodged between the lines of such tales. These histories and so called mythologies are retold and revealed in both Pule and Walsh’s paintings. More than mere poetic  musings, they are real stories and statements of self-definition, posing a Pacific-centric counter-perspective to Western perceptions of Pacific art, people and culture.   

Reuben Friend - Curator Māori and Pacific Art, City Gallery Wellington

_______________________________________________________

Works in order of appearance:

Email the gallery

or call for purchase info.

+64 6 867 9721

JOHN WALSH

Significant Release

“In attempting to discover how much blood passes from the veins into the arteries I made dissections of living animals, opened up arteries in them, and carried out various other investigations. I also considered the symmetry and size of the ventricles of the heart and of the vessels which enter and leave them (since Nature, who does nothing purposelessly, would not purposelessly have given these vessels such relatively large size). I also recalled the elegant and carefully contrived valves and fibres and other structural artistry of the heart; and many other points. I considered rather often and with care all this evidence, and took correspondingly long trying to assess how much blood was transmitted and in how short a time. I also noted that the juice of the ingested food could not supply this amount without our having the veins, on the one hand, completely emptied and the arteries, on the other hand, brought to bursting through excessive inthrust of blood, unless the blood somehow flowed back again from the arteries into the veins and returned to the right ventricle of the heart. In consequence, I began privately to consider that it had a movement, as it were, in a circle. 
— William Harvey

PETER ADSETT

Betrayal

23 November – 22 December 2012

_______________________________________________________

All works are 2011-12 from Abattoir, a division of MOA

Medium: horizontality

Technical support: chiaroscuro

Material: black, studio detritus, acrylic paint, linen and stretcher

Email the gallery to request a works list

Peter Adsett was born in Turanganui-a-kiwa, Gisborne. He moved to Australia in 1982 and currently lives in Melbourne. All his works are from Abattoir, a division of MOA. For many years Peter had heard stories about Matawhero and of the descendants buried alongside his great grandfather’s burial site at Makaraka cemetery. It was not until his tertiary years guided by Cliff Whiting and Frank Davis that his understanding and knowledge of this area was challenged. Peter’s education in the late 70’s went to a much greater depth when he was introduced to the local Iwi at Muriwai in the late 80’s in response to a project he was involved in and still is to this day. Threading its way through all these stories was Te Kooti and the descendants of Rongowhakaata. Peter’s first response was ‘Matawhero: Bullet Holes and Bandages’ and he now returns home to unveil Betrayal.

Since 1989 he has presented annual exhibitions, each one of which is devoted to a single series of large- scale, abstract acrylic paintings. These have been shown at galleries in Australia, Indonesia and the United States. Adsett trained at Palmerston North and Massey University in the late 1970s, the artist (who has an MFA, awarded in Australia in 1999), taught studio at Centralian College, Alice Springs (1996-7), and at the School of Fine Art, Northern Territory University, Darwin (1993-2001). He has given lectures and workshops in Indonesia, New York and Wellington. Adsett was artist-in-residence at Canberra School of Art during 1997, in Yogjakarta, Indonesia (funded by Asialink) in 1999, and at the International Studio programme in New York in 2001 funded by the Australia Council and NT Museum of Art). Since 2000, Peter Adsett has exhibited in New York and Boston and in 2001 was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2004 he was artist-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and his collaboration Two Laws toured NZ. In 2005/6 Peter was involved in The Koru Club, an exhibition of artists who have responded to the work of Gordon Walters at Pataka Museum in Porirua, Wellington.

Peter was awarded a PhD scholarship by the Australian National University (ANU) Canberra, AUS and was asked to explain how abstraction, through black and white enters a dialogue between Maori and Aboriginal cultures. Adsett’s aim in this exhibition is not to paint a narrative of the events of the Siege of Ngatapa* in 1868, but to investigate the concept of betrayal. He sees it as a term that operates in the relationship between Maori and Pakeha,Betrayal is situated at the interface, in the middle of the debate. Although his primary aim is to dialogue with Maori, there are implications for Aboriginal art too (unavoidable when working with horizontality). Horizontality, by its very nature, is the locus of place, the inception of ground where the language of painting comes from whether for Maori or Aboriginal people.

“The desire for reconciliation will not be met and we are left with only the feeling of betrayal, left with only the materiality of paint and the process that obliterates any image. The painting is an act of plain aggression. Frustrated, the black/darks, bleed, puncture, mock shadows, corners, edges. White, meanwhile, continually resists light and behaves as a material, a bruised skin, an oiled fabric, or cling wrap, suffocating any pictorial ground for resolution. The viewer stands in the light to witness what painting (linen and paint) has been subjected to. Who is betrayed? Maori, Pakeha, viewer, painting, all of these or none of these? The violation persists to accompany the negotiation across a cultural and political divide.” - Peter Adsett, text taken from his exegesis.

• * The Encyclopedia of New Zealand – http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/ngatapa-siege-of/1

• Images: Tom Teutenberg Photography