Each of us has a way of coming to terms with a new place, an unexpected event or situation. Staying Over brings together four projects which offer different ways to think about what a place is, beyond simply being a geographical location. These works consider hospitality, imagined worlds, relationships and performances as being part of the way we experience and understand the places we live.
In this exhibition the Hirschfeld gallery itself, usually Wellington focused, becomes host to works by two Christchurch artists, Adam Willetts and Maria Walls, whose studios and local exhibition spaces have been disrupted by recent events. They join a Wellington based collaboration between typographer Annette O’Sullivan and copywriter James Francis, and Amy Howden-Chapman, a Wellington artist currently resident in Los Angeles, California.
These very different projects share the room, and an idea that a place is something we make, imagine, or come to understand through writing and conversation. Willett’s ceramic sculptures may be small worlds in themselves, or they could represent hybrid forms of flora, fauna, or geological specimens from other worlds. Ambiguous in scale, they suggest landscape forms, but also the crude, pixelated graphics of old 2D video games, or the awkward polygonal environments in modern 3D games.
Walls’ installation has two parts: Host is a series of large scale photographic images, Offers is a small press publication, inserted into the exhibition brochure. The wall mounted images are surreptitiously photographed from another exhibition context. Appropriated by the artist, these images are edited, enlarged, and re-installed here as artworks. Her practice adopts the role of host to displaced images, philanthropically ‘accommodating’ them in new ways, while willfully unsettling the conventions of art appreciation and display.
Chasing Losses is the final act in a series of performances by Howden-Chapman. Each considered the effects the current global economic recession, on different European ports, the cities of Melbourne and Los Angeles, and finally Wellington late last year. The performance addressed the psychology of the current financial crisis, and different ways to represent and construct it into an understandable narrative. The installation presented here is the afterlife of those performances, their documentation and material traces, and a poster publication by the artist. Post-performance, the project becomes an account of all the places it was enacted, the places become events in its history.
O’Sullivan’s series of posters was developed in collaboration with copywriter James Francis. Francis’ lyric copy about wooden typography was hand-printed by O’Sullivan using wooden type, a print form originally popularised by the advent of advertising, which demanded large scale text to be read from a distance. Referencing broadsheets and tabloid billing, these works evoke the headlines through which we often encounter crises first. The wooden letter forms also represent architectural structures, and the ‘places’ we initially experience events.
Temporarily ‘staying over’ in the gallery, these projects remind us that art is always subject to impermanent accommodation. Even so-called permanent works are dependent on renewals in tenancy, and site stability, while others are bought and sold, curated in and out of galleries, loaned, traded. Each of these projects deals with the idea that a place is not necessarily fixed or lasting, that it is community and relationships that endure.
Public Events
Artists' Talk—Adam Willetts and Maria Walls: Saturday 21 May, 1pm
