John Hurrell – 29 June, 2025

A pair of damaged car front-windows hanging off each end of a rod, balanced and rarely moving—are suspended from the ceiling. Or another of three with one in the middle. (Perhaps these are cracked motorbike or jet boat windscreens?) Shattered curved transparent and reflective screens with square and round corners, bordered by black steel. The smashed heavy green glass is laminated and disturbing, yet oddly beautiful too.

They are entitled Shift Pianos, suggesting there is a relationship of overlapping planes apparent when peered through—though flawed with slews of silvery cracks. Related to a pianistic duo playing in an acoustically disastrous hall. Parallel horizontal sound experiences are compared to viewed parallel vertical vistas. This work seems to allude to Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, as well as Bruce Nauman’s rotating cast flayed-animal carcasses.

Two other works are on walls: horizontal pairs of glowing glass tubes (one pale blue [argon gas], the other orange [neon]) on which at the righthand ends are placed two lit burning wax candles. One light source is horizontal; the other vertical. One electrical; the other very small conflagrations.

This is the third show with Lett from Cerith Wyn Evans, a Welsh conceptualist sculptor known for his subtle wit and startlingly innovative & evocative combinations of ready-made. For Auckland art lovers these four works are a ‘must-see.’ Understated, they build up constructions of visual and ideational beauty by focussing on processes and cumulative aftermaths of destruction.

The wax candles crumble and drip onto the floor while the crushed slivers of glass dazzle with their dense silvery webs, yet remaining intact. They both hint of perfection via collapse. Decay is exalted, for form is mutilated, distorted and enhanced, origins of pristine impeccability perhaps to be forgotten.

John Hurrell

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