Thurs. 10/03 - Sat. 26/02, 2011

Folded Room: Paths Crossing

Kathy Barry

// Opening 6pm Wed. 09/03

The more I kept finding myself returning to these pencil-gridded kaleidoscopic abstract works, the more I realised they speak to the battleground of edges between things. The way in life we cannot adopt one system without having to concede it is failing as much as succeeding... While embracing a package of structures from modernism, they constantly fight the idea of some forward momentum and harmony, to suggest a constant shifting forward and back; of things being built up, build down, built over and built around. On the surface they have the appearance of a fiendishly complicated modular board or computer game, but in their thick web of abstracted influences there's a battle going on between different cultures, aesthetics, and hierarchies. One minute I'm thinking of the gridded battleground spaces of Uccello's San Romano, the next I'm feeding the watercolours of Frances Hodgkins through cubism enroute to the drips of the abstract expressi onists and cubes of the geometric abstractionist. Then I'm unfolding it all as boxes in Wellington with Richard Reddaway. The carefully trained drips of watercolour course along side the channels created by the vertical pencil marks, like blood spilt from battles between design and art, and one moment in cultural history and another.

- Mark Amery

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