The house of Dowse

By Mark Amery

The museum with the hot pink boys’ bathrooms, TheNewDowse isn’t so new anymore. Reopening in 2007 after an extensive refit, this dynamic institution does however have a new director, Cam McCracken. And the current suite of exhibitions, which talk beautifully to each other, augur well for his term.

Just like its brash new title and bathrooms, everything about the refitted Dowse screams a love of culture clash and difference. While institutions usually tend to visually put their authorial stamp on the landscape with strong, unified design and architecture (think of all those great classical and modernist edifices), the house of Dowse celebrates the fact that “innovation and forward thinking flourish in New Zealand” (a text from Time magazine scrawled on the entrance wall) by bamboozling you with a postmodern higgledy-piggle of overtly artful design ideas. Like a labyrinth of mirrors, it’s rather fun but also completely bewildering.

The expectation with a six million dollar refit was that the museum would find a new shape. Instead in a classic, brilliant if perverse Ian Athfield move, it accentuates the building’s shapelessness and the museum’s embrace of cultural collisions. Every time over the last two years I’ve thought I’ve come to terms with the architectural logic of a building that hides galleries around corners and up stairs, its undone by my struggle to find the exit.  

The Dowse is akin to a house that reflects the passing of time through its different physical extensions, and artefacts placed on every available surface. In theory then it should be the perfect match for a crowded mixed hang of a private collection - such as Thrill Me Every Day currently on display, drawn from the collection of the late Celia Dunlop (who sadly passed away in 2008).

Yet the experience of art in a domestic setting – the unexpected surprises around every corner, the intimacy of your relationship to the objects - doesn’t translate in the same way to the more impersonal museum space. Despite identifying in wall panels strong thematic ideas through Dunlop’s collections, the curators have generally resisted trying to make visual sense of the collection, and the exhibition is less rewarding as a consequence.   

This is still an Aladdin’s Cave of small art treasures, testament to many an hour spent with Wellington’s best art dealers finding the affordable jewels that bring new life to old forms. Dunlop started well, at age 18 buying an early Joanna Margaret Paul watercolour that here completely captured me - the way Paul can make anew a study of flowers, delicately teasing poetry out of the tug between ragged, wild spirit and domestic pattern.

Strong is Dunlop’s affinity for work that in the decorative finds a connection to the spiritual charge of the earth. It’s most apparent in a stunning range of ceramic work that speaks to our place on the Pacific ring of fire, from Rick Rudd’s blue volcanic tusk-like form to Christine Thacker’s green pierced oval dish, that looks like it might be a coral cup for a bed of kina.

So many of the artists here are underrepresented in our public galleries and overdue for more consideration. Cam McCracken has a job on his hands in this regard. Private collection shows like this could be judged gap fillers for public galleries who as collectors and curators should be representing the diversity of contemporary New Zealand art practise, rather than relying on astute private collectors and dealers.

As if to emphasise the point, one artist from Dunlop’s collection, John Walsh has a survey exhibition next door, and the work is all drawn from private collections. To experience Walsh’s astonishing oil paintings beautifully lit, is to swim through some carved Maori dream portal and bathe in a fluid visual theatre full of phantasmic figurative gymnastics and cheeky, sharp-witted reimaginings of cultural encounters.

Walsh and the likes of Diane Prince give fresh muscular movement to traditional design and bring alive stories from a contemporary perspective in a charged otherworldly space. Upstairs there’s a newer generation of Maori artists smartly represented in Plastic Maori. Billed as an exploration of Maori artists who use plastic and synthetic materials, I was expecting a fairly ho hum overview of what is now familiar territory. Yet not only has curatorial intern Reuben Friend designed the exhibition cleverly conceptually, he has done so with rare attention to its visual unity and beauty, echoing the storytelling architecture of the wharenui. It’s a good advertisement for letting young curators loose in our public galleries. That is, if you can find it.

Thrill Me Every Day and Flying Solo – John Walsh, until 13 September, Plastic Maori, until 9 August, The New Dowse, Lower Hutt.