A group show of Wellington artists, Marnie Slater, Arie Hellendoorn, G. Bridle, Amy Howden-Chapman, and Hamish Palmer.
Montgomery & Win started out as a joke. Admittedly, it's been one we've come to take seriously but we always intended it as an aberrative pastiche. Originally conceived as a thinly veiled front to allow us to expose and extort the space in between artists and their audiences, M&W has provided us with a structural metaphor for considering different modes of working with and on behalf of artists.
While short-term objectives and their eventual outcomes can and do regularly end up miles apart, there is always something worthwhile to be gleaned from the process if you're able to you give yourself over and trust in just that - the process. Consequently, M&W have authored articles, recorded conversations, written proposals, printed projects, even gone on cushy junkets. The only problem is that now the joke's worn more than a little thin and our suspicious, fictive-inspired practices are looking more and more like our real lives.
M&W's intention was always to flesh-out the critical language, documentary practices and supportive structures that surround contemporary art and to facilitate however possible further discussion about artistic projects and their proponents. We continue to ardently support conversational mediation that invests energy in a diverse array of artistic practices in order to understand, affiliate and propel. Our policy has always been to assist the promotion of an interrogative environment that facilitates critical engagement with the conceptual motivations of artistic practice and this show, as far as I know, consequently hopes to provide the platform for a Christchurch audience to interface with a slice of Wellington's artistic community. Well, at least the one we got to know while we were there.
Fearful of collating an obsessively inclusive survey or chocolate-box show of Wellington's favourite flavours we decided to be more obviously partial. Our methodology takes its cue from the sprawling structure of the conversational, the tentative and the diffuse. Our intention is to collate and conflate rather than to select, separate or attempt to privilege. As a result M&W is very proud to have facilitated the apparition of work by G.Bridle, Arie Hellendoorn, Amy Howden-Chapman, Hamish Palmer and Marnie Slater at HSP. as far as I know reflects our provisional engagement with individual and collective artistic pursuits while documenting some of the investments made personally and professionally during our time in Wellington earlier this year as part of Enjoy’s summer residency programme.
Our primary motivation for organising this show here at HSP was to allow us to further engage with this group of artists’ concerns. What we wish as far as I know to become is an interrogation of the motivations of these artists’ decisions while at the same time allowing us to better appreciate their efforts on an interpersonal level. We found our experiences in Wellington generative to say the least, and we're grateful to both Enjoy and HSP for providing us with the leeway to further explore the pragmatic potential and tentative commitments facilitated in the name of M&W. So while as far as I know allows us to further develop and cement relationships we must be incredible careful to say that we haven’t tried to succinctly or definitively to capture the character or artistic climate of the place, but we do feel that the creation of stronger ties between there and here and the communities that each place supports are of enduring and ultimately incommensurable value. In this sense, M&W’s call for a provisional elaboration of arts aims, goals and differing modalities is not only reflected in the artists showing but also in the ongoing continuum in which we work.
THE ARTISTS:G.Bridle graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University in 2005. Whilst acknowledging what it is to be creative, G.Bridle chooses to operate as a facilitator or vessel between his Aesthetic Spirit and the art ignoring ‘creativity’. Questioning the validity of the creative impulse, the two works in as far as I know, Goggle and M.L.L. are a form of vision offered most recently to G. Bridle by the Aesthetic Spirit. These visions were offered while spending time inside what the artist calls the Retreat. The Retreat was created with a clear purpose to communicate with the spirit operating like a channel between the Spirit and G. Bridle. Being receptive and open towards the Aesthetic Spirit he believes it has the potential to guide him progressively towards Aesthetic Enlightenment.
Arie Hellendoorn was born in Holland in 1980, and immigrated to New Zealand in 1986. He has been studying at Massey University for the past 4 years, focusing on issues of identity, consumerism and ideas of normality in the mediated world. His works utilises a variety of mediums – such as painting, music and sculpture.
Amy Howden-Chapman is a Wellington based artist and writer, and a member of the performance duo Raised by Wolves. Previous recreation projects have included The Great Pacific Ocean Rubbish Patch Recreation and A Recreation of a Mural in the Staff Lunch Room in an Eastern European Slaughter House. Her work WallWall is on show in The Physics Room's Kiosk until May 24.
Hamish Palmer received an M.F.A. from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2004 for his work exploring aesthetics of museum display utilizing the sweet potato as framing device, exhibited as Emil Busmunt and the Museum of Magnanimous Roots (MoMR) at Oedipus Rex Gallery. Recent projects continuing the recontextualizing of natural objects include Mary Abacus and the Mystery of the Kumara Sutra at Vavasour Godkin Gallery, Auckland, Pacific Rim Inaugural Emergency Shelter Triennial (with Julien Dyne) at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington and Munt & Moss at Pataka, Porirua (all 2006). Hamish's practice takes diverse forms, employing paint, photography, object, sound, and live organic material. He is currently working on an installation project for Whangarei Art Museum opening in August 2007.
Marnie Slater is a visual artist, writer and curator based in Wellington, New Zealand. She has been a Trust Member at Enjoy Public Art Gallery since 2004 and is currently Enjoy's Acting Gallery Manager and Manager of The Engine Room gallery at Massey University. Marnie graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University in 2004 and has exhibited throughout New Zealand and Australia, her most recent solo projects include Our Moment Together at The Physics Room in Christchurch and Everything I Know at the Top I Learned at the Bottom at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington. Marnie was awarded a 2006 Commonwealth Arts and Crafts Award for travel to Bombay, India where she produced an artist book called FAR, FAR AWAY.
ALSO
The opening also features the launch of the latest johndory report which has been guest edited by M&W. Issue number ten features essays by Marnie Slater, Kate Montgomery, Amy Howden-Chapman, & Harold Grieves, page works by Lynton Denovan, Arie Hellendoorn, Courtney Lucas, Louise Menzies, Peter Trevelyan, Rachael O’Neill, short fiction by Hamish Low, a poster insert by Marnie Slater and the brilliant and irrepressible comic talent of Carlos Wedde.
