Reusing the Familiar

By Mark Amery

It’s no wonder that artists are increasingly turning to reuse objects as a basis for art. Everyday, society is asking us to look harder at the piles of inorganic packaging and furniture that surround us, leading to us rather guiltily consider their contribution to our future on the planet.

For many contemporary artists this is partnered with an interest not in making such things abstract but in their rich textured readings when put in connection with each other to explore their own concepts about this world.

Second Life at Pataka, curated by Helen Kedgley, smartly brings together five New Zealand artists’ projects by practitioners well known for their recycling of common domestic and office objects into art. Well chosen, each artist is given generous space to bring together recent and new work. It’s not just their material and a concern for the environment that makes these five a strong grouping, but a shared interest in making the banal fantastic and animating it to create models of the natural world. The gallery is a carefully organized riot of furniture and refuse brought to intelligent life.

Niki Hastings-McFall’s works, all new, remind me of the playfulness of early Judy Darragh (also represented here by three strong works from 2007). Of particular interest are five miniature dioramas within fake floral arrangements, placed atop wooden lampstands. Apparently referencing stories from her childhood, the domestic furnishings and decoration - from Crown Lynn vases to seeds, shark’s teeth and a plethora of cheap plastic trinkets - together suggest a fabric of stories elevated to the iconic universal standing of church iconography.

Beautifully lit, plastics glitter and gleam, seducing the eye and elevating these arrangements to the status of community relics that allow meditation on the fleetingness of beauty and life. The best are at once irreverent comic folk art and objects of worship full of magic and glory. My favourite, ‘Narcissus’ retells the well known story with a plastic skeleton with synthetic leaves for wings skimming like a dragonfly on a pool made from a computer mini disc. Lighting from two directions off the mirror surface creates a twin shadowplay, one making the figure for me resemble a grasshopper in a lush garden, the other a witch in fairyland.

Packing a great visual punch but with a less enduring impact for me was Afu, an arrangement of an astonishing 3000 plastic leis hung from plumber tubing, paying tribute to Samoa’s famous waterfall.             

Judy Darragh’s work here reminds us that a second life can be that beyond our own living rooms on this planet - that we and our furnishings are part of a far bigger universe oozing and exploding with activity. Like Darragh, Peter Madden brings explosive cosmic ideas of the universe into play through a constant ever-changing abstract play with found materials. ‘Can It’ is a table of Madden’s collaged tin cans containing a superabundance of objects and ideas, inspired by the profusion of forms on the earth and their fragility, as found in National Geographics, from which he cuts out imagery. Resembling nests for life and death, with these cans he equates the artist’s inventive play with form with that of the birth, growth and flight of life. ‘Can It’ is more of an open-ended delight than it is a satisfying finished work, that sense of completion left to the impressive framed photographic collage The Leaving (part of the Auckland Art Gallery’s Chartwell Collection). Here a cornucopia of tiny winged creatures and the technology that makes us humans mobile fly from an empty central circle, as if fleeing in the earth’s imminent environmental eclipse.

Joanna Langford engages us with the air, a fantastical billow of plastic shopping bags leading us to ladders and towers built from bamboo skewers that suggest another fragile realm. As sculpture the work is against heaviness, consciously lightweight. If nothing else, as the taped-together bags balloon into puffy clouds with the aid of domestic fans it is enormous fun. 

Eve Armstrong is the least fantastical of the bunch. Her dry conceptual wit makes her the descendent amongst this bunch of that great re-user of found furniture Marcel Duchamp. She sets herself the challenge of animating and making us value the things we most devalue, the shelving, racks, lids, bags and bins that usually contain things. It’s as if in her assemblages and collages these vessels are trying to make a run for it to follow the ideas that were once held by them.

If I have one general criticism of this exhibition it’s that these artists have all been given generous public space for similar projects in the region recently - Hastings-Mcfall and Darragh at Pataka and Langford, Madden and Armstrong at City Gallery. Much of the work for the regular gallery-goer is now familiar territory. Yet it’s hard to argue with the pleasure they offer a wide public, Pataka’s great commitment to these artists, and their relevance to Porirua and its shopping precinct, crammed with cheap imported goods. Second Life is a rich and rewarding pleasure.

Second Life, Five Artist Projects, Pataka Museum of Art and Culture, until 11 October