Andrew Paul Wood – 23 February, 2012

Tim Veling is visiting lecturer in photography at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. His exhibition Support Structures is part of their Place in Time project which first started in 2000. Refreshingly Veling departs from that formula of essentially photojournalistic black and white images to exercise what is a very good eye for formal detail and colour.

The theme is the many different props, braces, and buttresses corseting and suturing together various masonry structures in Christchurch following the terrible quakes of 2010 and 2011. This offers a fairly robust subject to create a suite of images around.

I was somewhat apprehensive - oh dear God, not more earthquake art?! - but in fact the subtle formal aesthetics and witty details make even the most frazzled Cantabrian forget about the context and just look. In one image of an old brick building after one of winter’s heavy snowstorms (the icing on the quake, as it were), the bricks glow sullenly in the predominantly white monochrome… And then a perfect Barthesian punctum - the black and red logo of a New World shopping bag, half buried in the snow, blazes out like a dog’s proverbials. Elsewhere the effect is achieved with road cones.

In an image of the old Canterbury Municipal Chambers building (Now Our City O-Tautahi, the beautiful Queen Anne-style brick building on the corner of Worcester Boulevard and Oxford Terrace), what appears to be a long exposure gives a lovely antique quality to the colours skewed to a liquid gold, russet, sepia, and green in the early twilight.

Another image shows a particularly splendid rusticated masonry wall buttressed against a big, crude concrete cube. The contrast is striking, and appealingly sculptural, especially as the concrete block sits incongruously, plonked down in an otherwise carefully manicured lawn, surrounded by an almost neurotically tidy buxus hedge. Very Christchurch. Life goes on, standards must be maintained, and in the Garden City they just garden around the obstruction.

A leaning lichgate forlornly dangling its ribbons of warning tape here, a cracked archway seeming strangely out of time there. Shipping crates, now ubiquitous in Christchurch, become a reoccurring motif. Christchurch Cathedral looks like one of those mock Gothick ruins an eighteenth century Lordship might erect on his estate to make it more picturesque. Just for a moment, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of The Blessed Sacrament, surrounded by cranes, might actually be in the process of construction. This was before the celebrated dome, that once delighted George Bernard Shaw so much he declared architect Francis Petre “the New Zealand Brunelleschi”, was taken down and put away.

The marvellous thing about these photographs is the way Veling draws out the formal geometric qualities of the various improvised struts and props, each different, each serving the same purpose. It’s not quite Bernd and Hilla Becher’s concrete water towers, but a similar cataloguing impulse is at work. It is, however, the more picturesque and human elements of the architecture being supported, and the pure constructivist installation qualities of these random structures, that gives Veling’s pictures much of their charm.

Ultimately they are also metaphorical - the props represent the spirit and pluck of Canterbury people bound together by common experience, holding each up and supporting each other.

Another interesting connection relates to the Japanese search and rescue crews who played such an important part in locating survivors and bodies after the February 2011 quake. Japan of course suffered an even worse earthquake soon after, which brought with it a devastating tsunami and the disaster at the Fukashima nuclear power plant. Veling has been spending time in Japan, and this exhibition is also showing in Isamu Noguchi’s glass pyramid in Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, Japan.

Andrew Paul Wood

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