Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to EyeContact. You are invited to respond to reviews and contribute to discussion by registering to participate.

wf

Millwood at Suite

AA
View Discussion
Adrienne Millwood's Real Life installed at Suite Adrienne Millwood, Tokyo, 2013, oil on print on canvas, 1152 mm  x 1295 mm Adrienne Millwood, Empire, 2013, oil on print on canvas, 1152 mm x 1295 mm Adrienne Millwood, Green, 2013, oil on photo-releases on canvas, 291 mm x 326 mm Adrienne Millwood's Real Life installed at Suit Adrienne Millwood's Real Life installed at Suit Adrienne Millwood, Portal, 2013, oil on photo-releases on canvas, 580 mm x 648 mm Adrienne Millwood, Fuji, 2013, oil on photo-releases on canvas, 204 mm x 226 mm Adrienne Millwood, The Presidents, 2013, oil on photo-releases on canvas, 580 mm  x 648 mm

In all of Millwood's images, real life itself is up for question and maybe the best that an artist and viewer can make of it is a glimpse: moments in between other moments and memories, reconstructed and reshaped to make sense of. If nothing else, at least the act of painting is an action intended to provide meaningful reflection and commentary.

Wellington

 

Adrienne Millwood
Real Life

 

27 February - 23 March 2013

Snapshots of holidays in faraway places and photographs of childhood and family have been central to Adrienne Millwood’s photo-release prints and canvases for at least the past three years - and in Real Life they still are, yet these new works also manage to be so much more.

Millwood’s art deconstructs and reassembles narratives and distant memories, curiously populating them with floating, biomorphic shapes, designed and dressed in the best of retro-interior colours schemes. Poised somewhere between abstraction and story-telling her prints have acted as both sentiment and formalist construct and this is a tension that remains of significance to the works that make up Real Life.

In Toyko, the subject from the late 1940s of Japan’s downtown capital is as much a photograph that documents a post-war tourist image, (well-suited for Western consumption - looking at, rather than with, its subjects), as it is a consideration of the artist’s source material, contributing to a formalist work-of-art-in-progress, with colourful jigsaw amoeba laying equal claim to the surface of the picture plane. In Real Life, images are forever in a moment and process of becoming and disappearing, anticipating realisation as pure abstraction or figuration as memory made visible, and in doing so, her practice is both a touching and a feisty visual experience.

Real Life also represents new territory for Millwood. In the surprisingly large scale of a number of these works, she seems to have reconsidered the scope and potential of her subjects. A new-found confident and pleasure in the premise of an arts practice centred upon a dichotomy promises that there is more potential in the content of her iconography and its development than previously anticipated. The self-assurance of Real Life is apparent in images that are subtle and perplexing: does the narrative dictate to the coloured network of shapes that are in the act of materialising around and within its figures and forms, or is it the other way around?

And the premise of nostalgia or reflection is as implicit in the abstract, paint-by-numbers forms and contours as it is in the familiarity of images like the Grand Canyon or Mt Fuji. If only painting and the resolution of an image were as simple as the sureness and authority of a paint-by-numbers puzzle. It is the kind of formula for success that any serious artist can only look back upon with envy, the promise of a solution from childhood right in front of your eyes, solving all the dilemmas as to how to bring to resolution the artwork that has just been nagging away, day after day. In drawing attention to the naivety of such solutions, Millwood also touches upon a tenuous faith in the very act of painting and the premise of an artist being able to give vision and substance to an idea through the materials of paint or ink on canvas.

In all of her images, real life itself is up for question and maybe the best that an artist and viewer can make of it is a glimpse: moments in between other moments and memories, reconstructed and reshaped to make sense of. If nothing else, at least the act of painting is an action intended to provide meaningful reflection and commentary. Real Life implies that the pleasure of looking and asking such questions has value. Could we, or should we, wish to ask for more?

Warren Feeney

Print | Facebook | Twitter | Email

 

Recent Posts by Warren Feeney

wf
Saskia Bunce-Rath, I turn him into shadows, 2018, Embroidery thread on calico fabric (framed), 195 X 140 mm

Bunce-Rath Tapestries

CITY ART DEPOT

Christchurch

 

Saskia Bunce-Rath
I am near the forest, but never in it

 

4 September - 24 September 2018

wf
Suspended from ceiling: Bing Dawe, Downstream under Aoraki -- Tuna with Barrier, 2018

Mid-Canterbury Water Issues

ASHBURTON ART GALLERY

Ashburton

 

Thirteen invited artists
The Water Project

 

12 April - 22 June 2018

wf
Peter Robinson, Fieldwork, 2018, Artist’s studio materials, including wood, wire, paper, metal, nails and magnets.  Courtesy of Peter Robinson, CoCA and Daniela Aebli

Robinson’s Fieldwork

CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOI MOROKI

Christchurch

 

Peter Robinson
Fieldwork

 

3 March - 13 May 2018

wf
Martin Poppelwell, Jerusalem III, 2018, paint on linen, 2000 mm x 1750 mm

Poppelwell in Christchurch

THE CENTRAL

Christchurch

 

Martin Poppelwell
 EFG

 

1 February - 4 March, 2018