Psychic Dabbling

By Mark Amery

If just as likely to be labeled borderline psychotic as psychic, artists have nevertheless often been seen as able to unlock the doors of perception to the unknown, the unseen and the inexplicable. To dabble in the mysteries. To make visible that beyond what we usually see.

Yet for all this, contemporary art currently seems pretty lacking in interest in clairvoyance. Most emerging artists today seem busier exposing the puffery around things - rather than asking you to believe an artwork might provide a portal to somewhere you haven’t been before.

Which is what makes touring group exhibition The Blue Room both perplexing and rather interesting. Curator Pippa Sanderson was originally inspired by a Dunedin house where spiritualists conducted séances in the 1920s. Thirteen artists contribute works that meditate on domestic telepathic activity and its instruments – from spirit photography and a shagpile witches hat, to tarot card symbols and Ouija boards.

In the wall text the question is asked whether, with many websites, television shows and 0900 numbers devoted to the subject, interest in psychic activity has been growing. Yet little evidence is given. Most of these artists are happy chewing on the fabric of familiar symbols and images – cleverly playing with the decorative motifs of spiritualism. It’s the work of the suspicious and curious rather than committed. The show effectively underlines our current huge appetite for historically-laden imagery and how it comes with a concurrent lack of interest in actually committing to any kind of belief.

Yet if the interest here is largely in surface nostalgia, it can be very rich. Bekah Carran ingeniously light-filled mandala meditation on sun and stars, and Andrea Du Chatenuier, whose work dominates in this installation exemplify this. Du Chatenuier’s gorgeous shaggy island carpet comes complete with candles, pottery flowers and skulls, and a rich ‘80s pink and grey colour scheme. On the back wall she’s shown conducting a spell for the exhibition. It’s all formally inventive and wittily self-referential yet lacking in any lasting impact.
   
Sanderson has assembled a strong band of artists. Dane Mitchell has previously collaborated with psychic and mediums to test the otherworldly atmosphere of the gallery’s white cube. His work Spell Materials (Communication Spell) is a decontamination of the framed preserved space behind glass that is the art world. Contained within a large white framed and glassed square, six test tubes lie on top of each other containing various unidentified fluids and materials. The work resembles a take on a piece of American minimal gaseous abstraction, but I was also engaged by questions as to where these materials might have been collected in a gallery, and how they might fill the surface if released.

Also engaging strongly with the theme on his own terms is Stuart Shepherd. Two television monitors on a plinth face away from each other, back-to-back. They show the backs of a couple giving each other comforting hug in a moment of deep emotional distress - one monitor showing you the side of the hug the other doesn’t. Both huggers occasionally look up and eye the viewer, sometimes with a mischievous smile. They break the dramatic spell, question the intimacy and our belief in the moment – disrupt the illusion you’re sharing a personal moment. Not only is it a beautifully, simply choreographed take on our televisual voyeurism, it questions telepathy – the trusting of what we sense.

Elsewhere, whether it was Sanderson’s own photographs or Lonnie Hutchinson’s large drawings (in both cases restricted to only two works) I was sometimes left feeling here I was getting only the beginnings of a conversation.  I love Johanna Sanders occasional faint projection of a woman in a white nightgown running and dancing on the wall near the door (a case of now you see her, now you don’t) but the artist could have done with a whole lot more room to play with and go deeper. Likewise Rebecca Pilcher’s East Chair – an armchair that gives off occasional and inconsistent evangelical bursts of audio on the dangers of psychic dabbling - only suggests an exploration of the misuse of power of those who profess to be able to communicate beyond the living.

The Blue Room may be a little all over the place but in the absence of other such thoughtfully constructed group exhibitions of contemporary art in Wellington this year it’s a rare provocative pleasure. 

The Blue Room, The Film Archive, until 21 November