KEY POINTS:
Art and architecture have always been closely linked. Some of the greatest artists - Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini - were also architects. A contemporary development is artists taking visions and scenarios from architecture and using its forms to make art freed from functional logic. The precedent for this is the work of Piranesi in the 18th century. He drew vast imaginary prisons.
Modern versions are done by James Casebere, an outstanding American artist. He adds photography into the mix. Casebere makes a model of a structure, sometimes based on an actual place, then lights it in a dramatic way from a hidden source which shines in through the windows. Then he photographs the model to create a feeling that makes the work ambiguously documentary or invented. Often he adds another element, perhaps flooding the floor to suggest the whole thing is in some way under attack. This last element gives an emotional depth to the image and adds mystery that lifts the work beyond any utilitarian model.
This process of conferring an emotional level is made abundantly clear at the Jensen Gallery where his work is on show until March 15. If you walk into the big space of the gallery and turn towards the west wall you see the large Luxor # 1. This is an impressive work of an arched apse-like space, with a bright square of light on the wall from an unseen window and an impressive scumbled effect on the ageing walls. Yet something seems lacking. Turn and look at the east wall and there is a similar construction with dust in the atmosphere and the beams from nine piercings in the wall turning the dust into shafts of light. The mystery is complete.
These stunning prints combine architecture, photography, lighting and art to make magic.
There is a similar preoccupation with architecture and architectural process by the five young artists whose work, collectively entitled You Are Here, is at Artspace in Karangahape Rd until March 1. Two walls of the main gallery are occupied with steps and a platform made from scaffolding supplied by Safeway Scaffolding. The artists - Fiona Connor, Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier - have supplied the idea. The idea is if you mount the scaffolding you can see through the narrow windows at the top of the wall. Usually frosted, the panes are now clear. The sensation being cultivated is that you get a new view of Auckland looking toward Mt Eden. You look over the rooftops, past the fly-tower of the old Mercury Theatre, across the suburbs and to the sky beyond. You are in a place you have never been before. Artspace becomes new space.
Whether this new view qualifies as an artistic experience is open to debate. The platform also offers a view to the floor of the gallery where there is a work by Fiona Connor. This comprises three sets of steel staircases: one complete, one damaged and the third derelict. The work is called Props and infers the processes by which the massively made and cleverly designed object can become junk when away from an architectural context.
These are big works but some of the other pieces you might easily miss. In the adjoining gallery, one work by Finn Ferrier is a chevron pattern on the floor. Art you can walk on. On the walls are tiny works by John Ward Knox that are moody and obscure and at the end of the longer room is a video work with two projectors of a big motorbike, a Ducati, thundering round a track, with plenty of emphasis on the death-defying lean when cornering. The two screens meet at the corner and emphasise the danger. On one screen the bike is overtaken, on the other it overtakes. You are in a new situation where your sense of space is perilous.
On the way out of the gallery, under the stairs, you might catch sight of a Zen garden, sand carefully raked into a pattern of hills and valleys. Not so much art as architecture but art as minimalist Japanese space.
There are further variations on the theme in the strictly minimalist work of Kazimierz Strankowski, whose photographs are at the Tim Melville Gallery until March 8. He takes dark photographs that are like geometric paintings but they are in reality sculptures made to look like architectural structures. These variations work best when there is a springing energy in the original piece as in Untitled 3 which is a tense arch - a detail from a work by Henry Moore.
The art year has opened with a string of group exhibitions at galleries. One of the more lively is at Newmarket's little Seed Gallery where the most intriguing work in the show is architectural: a tiny model room with nothing in it but a vacuum cleaner plugged into the wall. The feeling of this work by Stafford Allpress is exactly caught by its title, Moving. It is the essence of moving house when everything is gone except the cleaning utensil being used to prepare the space for someone else.
