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Bronwyn Fletcher, NANCY ; Katja Fabig, Jane Henzell , Emma smith &Louise Stevenson, 7 th June – 14 July 2002, Lopdell House Gallery, Titirangi, Auckland .
nancy is an attitude. It is an act of staged femininity. The four artists that feature in the exhibition nancy knowingly play with notions of the theatrical, the staged and the artificial. Lopdell House Gallery itself, once a genteel hotel, is transformed by this cast of four into an auditorium, a playhouse, a peepshow, and a shadow-theatre.
Katja Fabig likens her role as an artist to that of a theatre director. The blank canvas before her is the empty stage from which she constructs an artificially created space. The figure that occupies this space is the actor, be it a candy-coloured stripe, a single impasto flower or a painted rhomboid with a drop-shadow. The artist directs the action that ensues and thereby figures herself as entertainer and the painting as spectacle.
Fabig's fascination with the theatricality of painting stems from her experience with theatre as a child growing up in Germany. After school she would spend afternoons at the theatre her father worked at. She watched rehearsals, lighting, sound and set changes and the lively exchange between actors, directors, dancers, singers, designers and prop makers. Above all she was drawn to the work being carried out by the set painters who were able to translate all manner of images from A3 or A4 format onto huge canvases stretched on the floor with the aid of brushes inventively attached to long sticks. Fabig observed that the set painters were the silent actors in the theatrical production.
Although Fabig now resides in New Zealand, the influence of German art is never disconnected from her practice. The preoccupation with mortality seen in the work of German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys is cleverly recontextualised in Katja Fabig's practice through her incorporation of a range of visual sources gleaned from popular culture, particularly digital and graphic media. If Beuys's art is an expression of man's broken relationship with reality, Katja Fabig's bold pixelated paintings declare the permanence of this split with the advent of the hyperreal world of the computer game generation in which, she says, "a person can now die every day."
Departing from eternal life in the digital world we enter Emma Smith's Theatre of the Absurd - a pictorial drama in 12 parts exposing the 'black truth of the game show delusion.' Here Big Brother entertainment collides head on with panopticism - a term derived from the Panopticon, an 18th century prison design consisting of a central observation tower and an encircling building of cells that expose the occupant at all times to the gaze of the watcher in the tower. In the modern world, Foucault contends that the principle of panopticism dominates - the powerless are exposed and power lies in the relentless, invisible gaze that studies them.
Emma Smith portrays the chilling separation between observer and observed by locating her drawings within the bare white space of the paper, a device conceived by the artist to lend a nightmarish sense of suspense to the drawings and to highlight the filmic nature of the narrative. Smith likens the unsettling glow emanating from the drawings to the act of standing outside someone's house and watching TV through their window.
The ink drawn characters that make up the artist's sardonic drama oscillate uneasily between caricature and realism, fiction and truth. The narrative includes a strangely anthropomorphic poppy head; a landscape and its inverted double; a two-dimensional grate; an oddly detached image of war and a bibbed baby surrounded by an assortment of seemingly unrelated things - a pair of y-fronts, what looks to be an inquisitive chicken and a number of disconnected arms and wings. There is a synaesthetic dimension to the grid of drawings brought about by the inventive combination of static image and sound. For Smith, sound is linked to memory - her visual images generate a distinctive sound, which she records and incorporates as a further contextual layer to her work. A kind of 'shonky architectonics' results from the combination of the two elements in the overall installation.
Louise Stevenson's installation of paintings Someplace Near locates the viewer in an interstitial space at one remove from our actual place. Her eidetic paintings lead us deep into the theatre of the mind. Each piece of the installation manifests the vivid residual image of saturated colour that we see after staring into the sun. Stevenson describes the sensation as holding the whole world beneath your eyelids: "I closed my eyes and looked at the sun and all I saw was orange." Inspiration also comes from a passage in Apollinaire's poem "Windows" - 'The window opens like an orange / lovely fruit of light.'
Like the process of peeling an orange, each component of Stevenson's installation holds and then reveals the colour within it. There is an intensiveness inside the surface generated by the painted orange interior of the stretchers which gleams through the muslin surface and the subtle layers of varnish applied over the fabric. The geometric forms painted onto the exterior of the pieces mimic the lines of the architecture - they reproduce sight lines from a range of perspectives in the form of painted angles, slices, shapes and shadow lines cutting through space.
In a paradoxical sense, Louise Stevenson's paintings figure space, both architectural and psychological. Space becomes a multitude of relationships. The architectural setting is the ground; the viewer is the figure and the painting exists somewhere between the two - someplace near. The paintings have the elusive and intangible quality of a shadow play - they hover on the white wall like shadow puppets on a translucent screen, always eluding our grasp and ultimately returning to their own state of dividedness. Louise Stevenson's paintings capture such dissolving moments.
From the seduction of silence to seduction of another kind - Jane Henzell's suite of paintings, like a row of frilled and flouncey cancan dancers, are gloriously and gregariously alive. The counterfeit side of femininity is exposed as Henzell deliberately conflates the seductive with the toxic in her series of flower paintings in candy coloured enamels on lengths of printed wallpaper. Henzell describes the attraction of 'taking 'loveliness' itself and imparting to it a sense of toxicity,' which is for her, 'like the bittersweet aroma of a bouquet of flowers - or at least a canned version of it.'
Henzell's paintings attract adjectives to them like amorous suitors for their power to seduce lies in the irresistible appeal of dazzling colour and flowing line. The flowers arch and stretch across the lengths of wallpaper while the existing diamond shaped vine pattern on the paper acts as the support for the movement - a creeping frame of sorts. The paint is thick and fluid and comes in every shade of temptation, from lavender and grape, mulberry and magnolia to tangerine, peach and lime.
The content and format of Jane Henzell's series of paintings recalls 19th century botanical drawing and textile design as well as the sequential arrangement and nature inspired themes of traditional Japanese painting. When read vertically, Henzell regards each piece of the suite as a singular moment - read horizontally, the paintings become an ensemble.
As all the work in nancy amply demonstrates, an ensemble of singular moments adds up to an entire theatrical experience.
By Bronwyn Fletcher