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Two Rooms presents a program of residencies and projects
Robert Jahnke’s paintings, plaques and sculpture.
Auckland
Robert Jahnke
Bed of Roses
4 November - 28 November 2009
These works vary in motive from expressions of sorrow for the passing of loved ones or acts of injustice to condemnations of Pakeha ignorance.
Bambury at Jensen
Auckland
Stephen Bambury
The painting is at the wall
14 October - 18 December 2009
The affect from this taut interlocking tension is remarkable.
South Korean art
Auckland
Jin Shiu
Temporary Landing
5 November - 21 November 2009
It is a tight conceptual package, with lots of cross referencing and repeated symbols mixed in with a lightness of touch and lack of physical weight
Captain Oates comes to Rangipo
Auckland
S. J Ramir
Journeys
25 October - 14 November, 2009
Ramir is rapidly acquiring an international following. He works in the bleak landscape tradition developed by European filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokorov, Bergman and more recently Albert Serra, specialising in lonely figures of indeterminate gender slowly wandering in blizzardlike conditions through a hostile environment.
Contesting finality
Auckland
Julian Dashper
3 November - 22 November 2009
Dashper probably realised the current presentation would be a posthumous show, for there is a black, rueful humour in its ‘lastness’ fixation.
Cohesively Brilliant
Auckland
Wayne Youle
Token
13 October - 7 November 2009.
This seems a particularly focused Youle exhibition, without the wider range of art forms and content-types he has often shown in the past.
Trans-Tasman Collaboration
Auckland
Joint Hassles: Cross Colouring
Curated by Sarah Hopkinson and Harriet Kate Morgan.
22 October - 7 November 2009
Printing types: New Zealand Type Design since 1870
Auckland
Curated by Jonty Valentine.
25 July - 12 September 2009.
Of all those here, my favourite is Mark Geard’s subtly organic and discreetly fluid Artemis, based on Goethe’s innovative analysis of plant growth The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).
Class politics of musical and artistic education
Auckland
Daniel Knorr and Prisoners of New Zealand
Block
4 November - 28 November 2009
Like visitors to the cage, these real-life (unidentifiable) prisoners are documented discovering qualities in the instruments they explore – making sounds that happen to fit into the genres of punk, improv or free noise.
Love is just a four lettered word
Auckland
Derrick Cherrie
2 November - 28 November 2009
Like Bob Dylan with his song title that I head this review with, is Cherrie being ironic or deadly serious? Perhaps he is having a laugh at the artworld’s eager propensity for gossip and scandal?
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Christchurch
A great Place For boats Except in SW Winds
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21 October - 15 November 2009
Art about art, by any other name, and a refutation of the history of modern art as conceived and presented as a chronological progression of enshrined stylistic innovations. That kind of deterministic and axiomatic teleology has no place in this show.
International group show at Lett
Auckland
Angels & Demons
14 October - 21 November 2009
Images of rapid economic transformation
Auckland
Stefan Koppelkamm
Ortzeit- Local Time
28 October - 4 November 2009
With the progress of time they have become more youthful. Like a movie running backwards where dilapidation is repairing itself.
Geological museum window
Auckland
Finn Ferrier
Basalt and Asphalt
9 October - 5 November 2009
Ferrier’s peculiar jokes, besides generating an initial gut-level response of laughter, can also be a quieter meditation on the nature of collecting as a compulsive drive – a magpielike, driven action of reflex that demonstrates the constant need to pick things up while moving around a city.
Contemporary Physicals
Auckland
Modern Physics
Curated by Stephen Cleland
10 October - 29 November 2009
It is an inspired piece of curating by Stephen Cleland where the assembled artworks are deftly positioned in a convincingly cohesive sequence, and where there is an abundance of humour and aural and visual delight.
Taipei comes to Auckland
Auckland
Szu Han Chen
The room is too small to store memory
20 October - 6 November 2009
Her attention is focused not so much on the objects changing hands and their matching worth, but the flicking on of stories. Of course I’m saying here these two things are separable, and maybe that can be disputed.
Skimpy fragments add up
Auckland
To Say The Least
Ruth Buchanan, Ash Kilmartin,
Sarah Rose, D. M. Satele, Holly Willson
15 October - 31 October 2009
Music/History/Painting
Auckland
Michael Shepherd
SCORE
(Upon the electronic works of Douglas Lilburn)
September 22 - October 30, 2009
Rather than trying to make music Shepherd is attempting to paint a sort of conceptual portrait – often through quoted texts, like whole poems from people like Baxter (Lilburn loved poetry), or snippets of snide family comments - taken from the Lilburn biography by Philip Norman.
The highlight is an amusing Denys Watkins portrait of Pluto the Disney dog painting a picture. He is holding it with one ear, while having a brush tied to his tail.
Morris’s inventiveness here lies in the dropping down (or raising up) of flipped-over returning modules to form a repeatable, intertwined relationship between the two overlapping linear directions.
Yet for all that, this flawed work is still worth seeing. For this artist, Fractus 2009 is unusual because of the range of shape sizes within its unravelling concertina strip, and the way the dark negative shapes on its upper and lower edges interact with similarly angular ones in the centre.
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