Roadmarxibitions: Going to a hanging

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Going to a hanging

Kia ora tatou:
A few notes:

Hanging an exhibition has always been a really nerve-wracking thing for me. Wairua was no different.
We head out to the gallery with the framed pictures carefully swaddled in bubblewrap, driving like geriatrics and angering other roadusers.

Tough.

The next step is to sort the photographs into a coherent order, so the show becomes a whole and makes sense.

Another hour gone.
Then the exhaustive and exhausting business of getting htem on the wall at millimetrically precise intervals and heights.
Another 3 hours'
Finally the last few details. Catalogues and cards ( what have I forgotten) and back home for a quick shower and get ready.

Then the opening. fear and elation( will it be well-received?)

But the kicker is the next day. I thought it was just me, but friends who have exhibited all talk of hitting the ground with a thud and going flat the day after. You tend to wonder what you hae actually achieved. But the satisfaction begins to return after a day or so.

For those of you off-shore, here are a few photographs from the hanging.

Enjoy.

Ka kite ano

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Well Tony, Hanging an exhibition is like giving a lecture or artistic performance - one is totally drained at the end - you have given out heaps and the energy is gone for a while - time to take a deep breath and take a sip or two of the pale stuff and stand back and enjoy what you have done!
Great Work. You have given us a small window through which to look at your efforts. Thank you for sharing and baring your soul
BB; December 5, 2006 at 10:16 PM
Anonymous said...: Tony: I'm still smiling over the title to this post. I suppose it might feel a bit like that. What did you choose for breakfast?; December 9, 2006 at 9:48 AM

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Artist's Statement

Artists often talk about what informs them. By this they mean the influences that come to bear on their work and what they seek to say in it. Sometimes those influences are technical and process-oriented; sometimes they are to do with content. But they are always there. They inform an artist’s practice. As a boy I was born and grew up in the country. My first memories were of the wind carrying stories and pinning them to the needles of the pines outside my bedroom window. Some nights there were many left there for me to mull over, at other times they were relatively few. My imagination was obliged to fill in the gaps. So I came to love trees for the stories they had to tell. We lived in a house set up on a hill. I would often rise early, and go out to the kitchen to share breakfast with my father before he left for work. He would lift me onto the bench, and I would watch the sun rise away out to sea. I came to love watching the birth of a day, the transition from darkness to the white light of day. I still do. Then we moved to the city, and these panoramas were denied me for many years. My substitute was the night sky, stars, and watching the passage of the moon across the sky. I leaned to see darkness as another side of light, that both light and shadow must coexist, in order for each to have any meaning. Later, as I moved deeper and deeper into the arcane world of photography, I was informed by other things, or more correctly, by other artists. I remember the first time I discovered the work of Ansel Adams. It took my breath away. He understood light and darkness. I wanted to make images like him using my own country as a source. It has taken 15 years for me to find my way back to that point. The great painter Paul Klee once said:” Art does not reproduce what we see, it teaches us to see.” How true. It was when I read of Adams' contribution to the environment, how his photographs had helped to protect the wilderness, that a dim recognition began to dawn. But there were other roads to travel. I moved through portraiture, documentary photography and commercial work, in each case informed by different artists. Costa Manos, Fay Godwin, Gary Winogrand, Arnold Newman, Robert Adams, Robin Morrison, Stephen Shore; all had something to teach me. I absorbed the lessons and moved on, in each case taking a small part of them with me. Then a friend, who was lightening his load preparatory to turning nomadic, gave me one of his books, a series of landscapes by a Japanese photographer I had never heard of. Takashi Komatsu had travelled many miles through his country on a project to photograph his river across four seasons. The images were breathtakingly perfect and displayed a reverence that was quite moving. When I read his statement, in which he talked of his hope that it would in some way lead to them being protected, the wheel came full circle. Photography can be many things. It originally came into being as a way of documenting the discoveries of the early European explorers and is by its very nature a documentary medium. Only later was it used for more expressive purposes. Komatsu was reaching back into a tradition as old as the medium itself. As was Adams. Their work thus tied into the very core of the medium, drew from its well. Now the light began to really glow for me. Once more I found myself back on that kitchen bench, watching the light and shadow. Now I began to be able to decipher the notes pinned on the trees. All around me the world was changing. The beautiful, the pristine, the eternal was being ground down by the relentless mill of human intention. And I had found a photographic raison d’etre. To photograph ugliness and despair is easy. Ugliness and despair want to be photographed; they jump up and down, their hands in the air, wanting to be acknowledged. For a reason. It is a strong photographer indeed who can take on this sort of work and not be infected by it. Beauty is so much harder to work with. It is easy to fall into the Slough of Cliché, to produce something that is decorative or derivative and half-perceived. To photograph the landscape in a way that is both reverential and influential is so much harder. A task fit for an aging knight on a rusting nag. So there it is. If just one of my images makes a difference, if just one causes a viewer to stop and think about how precious and fragile the planet is, then do something about it, my journey will have been of value, of some use.

Roadmarxibitions

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Going to a hanging

2 comments:

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