STUDIO 18D 2017

S T U D I O 18 D

9 S e p t e m b e r - 4 O c t o b e r 2 0 17 www.milfordgalleries.co.nz

Milford Galleries Dunedin 18 Dowling Street (03) 477 7727 info@milfordhouse.co.nz

CONTENTS

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1

MICHAEL HIGHT

Towards Port William (2016)

2

PAUL DIBBLE

Parallel Worlds (2013)

3

ANN SHELTON

Cell (After an Angel at My Table)... (2003)

4

JEFFREY HARRIS

White Painting (1998)

5

LISA REIHANA

PELT - Aquila (2010)

6

ROBERT ELLIS

Rakaumangamanga, 20th October (1980)

7

RALPH HOTERE

A Black Union Jack (1989/90)

8

W D HAMMOND

Headset 3 & 4 (1989)

9

PAUL MASEYK

Gash (2014)

10

IAN SCOTT

Lattice No. 105A (1983)

11

NEIL DAWSON

Vortex 5 (2012)

12

DICK FRIZZELL

Misty Morning on the Forgotten Highway (2015)

PRICELIST

MICHAEL HIGHT 1

Towards Port William (2016) oil on linen stretcher: 1110 x 1980 x 35 mm titled bottom left, signed & dated bottom right signed, dated & titled verso

Hight’s ‘Night’ paintings represent an intriguing and evocative development in his practice. Unlike his beehive works, the context that informs the paintings’ form and content remains largely hidden, and the viewer must construct their own narrative for each work.

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Towards Port William alludes to a specific place (in Rakiura/Stewart Island) and this provides some contextualisation for the objects depicted but the solid black background provides no other hints as to how and why they are related.

Figures, landscape fragments, and disparate objects are placed in a stark, stage-like setting to produce surreal, thought-provoking tableaux.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

Aurora, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2016

PAUL DIBBLE 2

Parallel Worlds (2013) cast bronze, corten steel edition 1/1 + 1 AP size: 3430 x 2116 x 807 mm

Parallel Worlds features Paul Dibble’s characteristic combination of realist and geometric forms, here especially apt as the sculptor explores the dichotomy expressed in the title. Two distinct worlds are immediately identifiable: that of nature, exemplified by the extinct huia, and that of man, which includes the angular ‘tree’ upon which the bird perches.

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Huia have special significance for Dibble and he often includes them in his works to invite reflection on the natural environment and the often destructive role of the hand of man. In Parallel Words, the huia looks back as man strides resolutely onward. Rather than depicting these as mutually exclusive spheres however, Dibble plays with the complexities of relationships between them.

Visual elements such as the line of a leg and the huia’s curved body work within the sculpture to suggest an underlying looping figure-eight/infinity form, reinforcing his concept of the interplay of both worlds.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

A Walk in the Park, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2013

ANN SHELTON 3

Cell (After an Angel at My Table) Seacliff Asylum, North Otago (2003) diptych; c-print edition 3/5 size overall: 1270 x 3150 mm frames: 1270 x 1575 mm each signed, dated, titled & numbered verso right panel

Shelton has an ongoing interest in inversion and doubling, and in Cell the oppositional (yet conjoined) concepts of public/private, interior/exterior, madness/sanity are replicated physically and visually. The women who once inhabited these rooms are evoked here by their absence. At one point in time marginalised from their social and cultural everyday, they were also physically re-located to its physical edges.

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The photographer uses her camera to make visible hidden narratives of power and control, and to explore the gendering of madness and the politics of incarceration. Throughout her practice, Shelton has considered “time, place, narrative, trauma and female authorship” and has produced significant bodies of work that explore unknown and subjugated histories.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

Images Recalled, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany, 2009 Double Take / Time Frame, Project Space, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2010

JEFFREY HARRIS 4

White Painting (1988) oil on canvas stretcher: 2130 x 1524 x 37 mm signed, dated & titled verso

White Painting references a number of the central subjects that Harris has continued to explore throughout his practice: the family unit, social relationships, emotional turmoil. The figures appear dislocated from their environment and isolated despite their proximity to one another but the painting nevertheless thrums with a palpable tension. One of the disembodied heads that float across the canvas is tethered to the central figures and other body parts operate as allegorical signposts for the viewer.

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Harris openly acknowledges the stylistic influences of German Expressionism and this work sits firmly within the painter’s expressionist oeuvre. The flattened perspective and bold brushwork accentuates the unreality of the images but at the same time suggests undercurrents of fraught, intense relationships – something also seen in the work of contemporaries Tony Fomison, Philip Clairmont, and Allan Maddox.

Provenance

Private Collection

LISA REIHANA 5

PELT - Aquila (2010) pigment print on paper edition 1/5 + 2 AP frame: 1704 x 1706 x 55 mm sheet: 1600 x 1600 mm signed & dated certificate

Following Reihana’s Digital Marae series, the subjects of Pelt control the discourse and reconfigure pre-conceptions of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, representation. The Pelt works establish spaces which exist somewhere and nowhere, the inhabitants of which seem of this world but also apart from it.

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The familiarity of their visibly human form is disrupted by the introduction of alien elements and unnatural poses; Aquila seems to have been captured in a moment of private ritual. They are unheimlich – eerily uncanny. The artist’s balancing of the familiar and the strange has the effect of drawing in and repelling the viewer: unnervingly beautiful, the longer the works are looked at, the harder it becomes to drag the gaze away Recalling the whakatauki “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua” (I walk backwards into the future), Lisa Reihana does not anchor Pelt in time or space.

The fluid identities of her portrait subjects enable them to narrate stories of the past, inhabit those of the present, and presage those yet to be told.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

3 x 4, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2016

ROBERT ELLIS 6

Rakaumangamanga, 20th October (1980) acrylic on unstretched canvas canvas: 1950 x 1705 mm signed, dated & titled lower left

This work comes from a suite of paintings which are imbued with the concept of tūrangawaewae - a deep connection with land which is both spiritual and physical. Ellis weaves together threads from his own sense of place and history with those drawn from his wife’s Ngāpuhi/Ngāti Porou heritage.

The Rakaumangamanga works are named for the maunga (mountain) they represent and to which Ellis is personally linked through his wife Elizabeth’s ancestral ties. Replete with symbolism, they address a particular time in history: “I was part of the landscape at that time when the land was being subdivided and sold with great conflicts between the local council and Maori shareholders of the land.” (1)

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Robert Ellis draws observations from personal as well as social perspectives to explore elements of New Zealand identities and the tangled histories contained in the land: geological, environmental, European, Māori, political, private.

1. Robert Ellis quoted in Virginia Were, “Taking McCahon Neat,” Art News, Autumn 2003, p46.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

Land, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2015

RALPH HOTERE 7

A Black Union Jack (1989/90) mixed media on stainless steel frame: 1324 x 1235 x 46 mm titled & dated bottom centre signed, dated, titled & inscribed “Port Chalmers” verso Ralph Hotere was unafraid to use his art practice to critique social, environmental, and political injustices. The ‘Black Union Jack’ motif first appeared in 1979 as a symbol of anti-apartheid protest and referring to the New Zealand Rugby Union’s continuing ties with South Africa. Corrugated iron or steel was regularly used by Hotere from the late 70s onwards; the material ensured that these artworks retained a sense of the everyday, ‘workingman’s’ vernacular at the same time as they addressed complex artistic and social concepts.

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A Black Union Jack features a Union Jack and Southern Cross burned onto corrugated iron with the phrase “A black union Jack” underneath. From the lower right quadrant of the flag flow golden-brown lines which may be read as streams of blood or water or licks of flame. As with many of the works of this period, it is framed in a weathered wooden frame, which provides a subtle visual link to the golden blowtorch marks and a textural contrast to the reflective and rippling steel.

Commenting on a similar work sold earlier this year, auction house MossgreenWebb’s suggest that the title could be read in a number of ways: “as a direct critique of the NZRFU – ‘This is a black union, Jack’; as a defiant variant of the 1960 slogan protesting the exclusion of Māori from the All Blacks team for South African games – ‘I’m all white, Jack’; and also as a comment on the British flag and its connotations of imperial racism in the colonies.” (2) Given the time this work was created, an argument might also be made that Hotere was referring to the increasing agitiation towards, and subsequent release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990.

1. http://www.mossgreen-webbs.co.nz/m/lot-details/index/catalog/45/lot/5253/RALPHHOTERE-This-is-a-Black-Union-Jack, accessed 30/8/17.

Provenance

Private Collection

W D HAMMOND 8

Headset 3 & 4 (1989) diptych; acrylic on wallpaper frame: 2188 x 1253 x 35 mm left panel: 1800 x 526 mm right panel: 1960 x 526 mm left panel titled lower left, signed & dated lower right right panel signed, dated & titled upper right

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Painted before the internet was king and cellphones became travelling repositories of all knowledge fit to google, Headset 3 & 4 may be read as a prescient parable for today’s ever-connected world. Hammond’s painted vision is “full of sound and fury”; all angles and scarlet clamour, it’s the artist’s version of an electronic, Dante-esque hell.

Hammond’s automaton-like figures inhabit a world where communication, sex and nature are commodified units of exchange. With uniform heads arrayed in grids like links in a circuit board, Hammond uses repeated waves and lines, and the strong contrast of red and black on white to create a background of visual noise that is unceasing. The paradox Hammond explores in Headset 3 & 4 is just as relevant today as it was when he created this work: where does space remain for human connection when individuals have become cogs in an industrialised system and interconnectivity increases transmission but drowns out communication?

Provenance

Private Collection

Exhibited

Significant Works, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2014

PAUL MASEYK 9

Gash (2014) red clay, slips, glaze size (h x ø): 629 x 209 mm signed & titled verso

Maseyk’s vessels are large in scale and often confronting in their surface decoration; they allude to the domestic origins of ceramic-ware, but perform as sculptural objects. As seen in Gash, his works often function as both object and painted surface and address a broad range of contemporary issues including pop culture, sexuality, politics, and economic consumption – with a strong sense of the ironic and the absurd.

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This social commentary is underpinned by Maseyk’s constant and considered references to age-old ceramic practices, including English slipware traditions and the decorative friezes of Ancient Greek amphorae. Traditional ceramic forms are stretched into new shapes, piled atop one another, and treated as a surface for illustration.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

IAN SCOTT 10

Lattice No. 105A (1983) acrylic on canvas stretcher: 1022 x 1022 x 41 mm signed, dated & titled verso

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First exhibited in the late 1970s, Ian Scott’s ‘Lattice’ paintings represent a comprehensive engagement with modernist concepts of surface, medium and abstraction. His concentration on fields of colour, the integrity of the picture plane and avoidance of ‘painterliness’ links these works to American abstract painters such as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella.

The soft saturation of monochrome colour in Lattice No 105A is the most obvious characteristic of this work, which was produced at the height of Scott’s experimentation with the Lattice works. Scott uses a mid-tone blue as the ‘background’ colour in the work, also employing it as an outline for each of the diagonal bands of light blue. Without the strongly recessive qualities of black or the vivid contrast of multiple highly saturated hues, the illusion of depth is less demanding and it is easier for the eye to dismiss this in order to concentrate on the flatness of the canvas and the linear forms it presents. The diagonal bands extend fully across the surface of the canvas and are not confined by a border; as with mathematical parallel lines there is the suggestion that they continue ad infinitum across a two-dimensional plane.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

Lattices, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2013

NEIL DAWSON 11

Vortex 5 (2012) painted steel size on wall (ø x d): 1285 x 340 mm

Beneath the ordered geometries of Vortex 5 lies a sense of unavoidable collapse, as paper plane forms disappear inexorably into a central void. From a series of works that Dawson produced after earthquakes wreaked havoc on his hometown of Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, this sculpture evokes not only a sense of physical upheaval, but also suggests the continual flux of everyday social structures that order life.

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Dawson tricks the viewers’ eyes into seeing smooth, swirling curves where there exist straight lines and multiple angles. His precise use of fractal images draws the gaze over and again into the centre of the work, the illusion of movement enhanced by the curvature of the sculpture’s surface. Vortex 5 provides a contemplative space to consider the paradox of ordered chaos present in both society and the natural environment.

Provenance

Received from artist’s studio

Exhibited

New and Recent Work, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2012

DICK FRIZZELL 12

Misty Morning on the Forgotten Highway (2015) acrylic on canvas frame: 1058 x 1308 x 50 mm signed, dated “20/5/2015” & titled bottom right

In the same vein as Duchamp and Warhol, Dick Frizzell deliberately subverts artistic traditions which deem certain subjects worthy of representation. He takes a wry look at the physical, intellectual, and cultural landscapes that surround him and chooses to paint what he wants, how he chooses. Frizzell’s paintings reimagine the unloved and overlooked, the ubiquitous and unremarkable; upon his canvases they become subjects whose everyday stories also deserve to be told.

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Misty Morning on the Forgotten Highway is not an expansive vista or a grandiose mountain range. Frizzell has turned his focus to a spot that is of no special consequence, it is the sort of landscape viewed from a car window on the way to more spectacular scenery further down the road. Frizzell celebrates the road signs and scrubby verges of these neglected places; his paintings suggest that they are just as worthy of contemplation as the majestic beauty of the Southern fjords or the overwhelming power of a raging Otira Gorge.

Provenance

Received from the artist’s studio

Exhibited

Up the Road, Milford Galleries Queenstown, 2015

PRICELIST

click on artist name to jump to that page

1

MICHAEL HIGHT

Towards Port William (2016)

2

PAUL DIBBLE

Parallel Worlds (2013)

POA

3

ANN SHELTON

Cell (After an Angel at My Table)... (2003)

9,750

4

JEFFREY HARRIS

White Painting (1998)

POA

5

LISA REIHANA

PELT - Aquila (2010)

6

ROBERT ELLIS

Rakaumangamanga, 20th October (1980)

POA

7

RALPH HOTERE

A Black Union Jack (1989/90)

POA

8

W D HAMMOND

Headset 3 & 4 (1989)

POA

9

PAUL MASEYK

Gash (2014)

2,750

10

IAN SCOTT

Lattice No. 105A (1983)

12,000

11

NEIL DAWSON

Vortex 5 (2012)

32,500

12

DICK FRIZZELL

Misty Morning on the Forgotten Highway (2015)

55,000

All prices are NZD and include GST; Prices are current at the time of the exhibition

30,000

25,000