MARK AMERY surveys two current exhibits at Pataka in Porirua: New Painting: Digital Age and Arts Society: Judy Darragh.


“WHAT DO YOU think of it?” the man asked the little girl in fairy wings of Judy Darragh’s work Arts Society. “A lot of hard work,” the child pronounced in open-mouthed wonder.

Out of the mouths of babes as they say, because I figure that’s exactly how art is often judged. We appreciate hardwork and rigour – and if we can’t see evidence of it, we can be suspicious a job’s been done cheap.

The labour it takes to produce a work of art isn’t always easy to spot on the face of things. Art rewards time spent, and that time will start to draw out the work it took to create.

Darragh’s installation at Pataka in Porirua is packed full of the surface dazzle of industriousness. Five trestle tables are flea market-like packed with wonky creations made from found material – from polystyrene snowmen to glitter rocks – where the artist revels in exploring in series the potential of the material.

Time spent here sees you start to see how, in this tribute to community arts (the project a tribute to the community history of its originating gallery, Te Tuhi in Pakuranga) Darragh with her overflowing vessels and fluorescent spills, is playing off between the aesthetics and the value of the accidental and artful; and questioning the distance we enforce between the art worlds at both end of the public spectrum. Study even further and the pentangular setup and the celebration of sloppiness within starts to resemble a Gaia model of a world engaged in organic recycling.

When I visited, a panel discussion was wrapping up next door with the five fine painters featured in neighbouring exhibition New Painting: Digital Age. Featuring the work of a new generation who use computers in the process of making their work, there was an air of defensiveness in artists’ responses to questions from the floor about why they choose to work in this way. Perhaps they often still get the feeling from people that to use a computer in the act of creating a painting is somehow to cheat.

If anything, Sara Hughes suggested, the computer causes her to do more work. And that’s something we can all surely relate to. This exhibition is full of work where the process isn’t so different from that previously done by hand, except that the computer provides for the ability to experiment more, collect more and exploit imagery even more radically.

In the work of Hughes and Andrew McLeod objects are spun, resized and squeezed in audacious toppling assemblages that are hard for us to get our head around, yet ultimately they are firmly rooted firmly in art historical precedents. Kelcy Taratoa meanwhile pushes digitatised image into colour-saturated distortion up large to express the volume and violence of his surroundings in true pop expressionist tradition. More simply, Darryn George is able to trial so many more different subtle variations of his designs on screen than his predecessor Gordon Walters could have hoped to in a similar time by hand.


Curator Helen Kedgley rightly suggests these are artists’ revitalising painting, but in some cases I end up wondering whether that revitalisation is a case of using the computer to draw out modernism’s endgame just that little bit longer.

Like schizophrenic screensavers, Hughes’ impressive recent paintings provide starbursts of platters of patterns zinging out at you. They’re served up like flipped and folded frisbees, drifting out of the maelstrom of a digital meteor shower. Strong conversations between different elements slowly reveal themselves. Exploring the complexity of space she takes flat formalist painting into new ground.

Resembling more a data waterfall than datastream, the teasing optical compressed complexity of Hughes’ work on canvas seems perfectly suited to the walls of the early 21st century boardroom. Bound by the canvas, however, they’re less interesting to me than Hughes previous big installation work where stenciled pattern interact with the architecture of a space as virus. For all their great strength I don’t actually care about these as paintings – as paint.

In McLeod’s paintings space is also a place of collapsed dimensions. As found objects are stretched, rotated, flipped and enlarged they have become unanchored from reality and are floating in a dreamlike space analogous with the artist’s psychological landscape.

Tim Thatcher shares many similar concerns to McLeod, but there’s an even stronger, sense of creating such landscapes from found objects. Landscapes expressive of personal fears, challenges, and the need to try and balance concerns.

Surreal, cartoonesque landscapes act like obstacle courses for the mind. In ‘Fetch’ black Tintin dogs with their heads trapped within fish bowls half full of water try to leap up for a stick that is tied to a flimsy wooden contraption hanging off a Roadrunner cliff-face. Shark-shaped clouds patrol the sky.

These are worlds full of traps and threats to negotiate, reminiscent of computer game environments: the viewer is asked to mentally jump moats, balance on logs or decide whether to pick up a shovel. This strong series of work marks the public Wellington debut of a significant emerging artist.

While the inclusion of recent work by artists Richard Killeen and Shane Cotton would have greatly furthered some of the conversations occuring in this show, ultimately New Paintings benefits from its focus on a new generation of painters. And it has far more coherence as a consequence than recent, more wide-ranging thematic contemporary shows at Pataka. It’s well worth your work to get there.

Arts Society, Judy Darragh and New Paintings: Digital Age, Pataka, until August 12.