A haunting aspect most apparent in Scott McFarlane's 'If you're feeling sinister'.
A haunting aspect most apparent in Scott McFarlane's 'If you're feeling sinister'.
Co-owner of Hangar Gallery, Megan Corbett, writes about a show of mature New Zealand artists.
Welcome to the Interventionist Reinventionists curated by one of the artists, Scott McFarlane.
From as far away as Dunedin, 2006 art laureate Alistair Galbraith has created unique experimental paintings describing sublime wintry, southern landscapes that converge into abstract realisations.
Utilising plastic bags and gyroscopic overlays, kebab sticks used as utensils to drag colours into each other, the surface has a organic marbled effect and kaleidoscopic patina.
Internationally respected as an artist and musician, Galbraith's work has graced the George Pompidou centre in France.
Greg Johns' 'Tui' sings a speech bubble full of rainbows.
Scott Macfarlane is a fulltime avant-garde artist based in Kerikeri. He delivers a thoughtful collection of beautiful painterly works with subliminal undertones.
There is a haunting aspect most apparent in If you're feeling sinister, in which a beautiful darkness emanates with suggestive reason, and shadowy figures are anchored in an other-worldly void.
Titles give us clues to the narrative of the work: for instance, Pictures of the past change their meaning fast is a landscape both contemporary and ancient.
Kawhia-based Ngati Pākehā and bohemian artist Russell G Shaw has Duchamp sitting on his shoulder while arguing out various psychic séances with his collaged artwork.
Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Venus feature in the many and various renderings, dragging old and new into a washing machine of irony and semiotic poses. Models Donna and Karinne also provide dialogue. Come and see!
Collage is also incorporated in artworks by Barry Francis Squire from Whangārei, who hunts down an interventionist in his piece What's the oil-Aue?
Bludgeoning paper has been worked to reflect the decayed images of gods and higher powers. Astro-physicians and mathematicians are invited to have a cup of tea and narcissistic mirrors of the past gaze into the cumulus nimbus clouds.
In Dev Junín and the square root of the hypercephalus, the Dev Junín figure is torn between an image of high notion Baroque, and a seven-stepped pyramid of prime numbers reaches for the interceding chemical trails.
Opua's Peter Geekie channels artist T. S. Lowry, and deep pools varnish over the late Tony Fomison's awkward smile.
The artist rides a bike across the American continent and dares to call it Ink Blot, but only after vanquishing an alien and taking psychic snippets of the effervescentcharnel houses of mid-America.
In the painting Celia's Grandfather, crowds loiter at the cocktail bar in the mothership. They seem to be waiting for an inter-galactic parliament to resume. The masterful "plan" tosses about figurines like voodoo dolls and skewered heads present themselves to a nicely attired bureaucrat.
Peter Donovan, from Wellington, depicts heroes of the outsider world in his folk art portraits, Call me Tiger, a painting of Northland and All Black rugby great Peter Jones, and Wild Bill Hickock and the Ace of Spades.
Jones was described as a "gentle giant" and the portrait has him clothed in Northland's blue jersey with icons of his life painted on each side.
Donovan's Angel painting hovers above the artworks Kowhai and Pohutukawa — it is, after all, an interventionist summer.
Also from Wellington, Greg Johns' Tui sings a speech bubble full of rainbows. Johns' print work simplifies the human condition to an acceptable visual manifest of straightforward images and support roles for stick figures without peripheral vision.
Johns' reality reinvents linear figures in muted tones and chromatic sensitivity.
Black works, an installation of six black paintings by Hawke's Bay artist Bernard Winkels, illustrates the trajectory of an en masse asteroid fall and somewhat ambivalent space junk intrusions.
His finely crystallised renderings lead us to view negative space infused with reinvented aerodynamic industrial diamonds powered with a well worked three dimensional graphite sheen.
• Interventionist Reinventionists runs at Hangar Gallery in Cross St, Regent, for another week.
