Arie Hellendoorn- Lost in Space

Ripple
Arie Hellendoorn

Layers on layers, fading out, collecting, swelling, but not quite droplets, I could have stared at these for hours. The textures he creates, movement, meiosis, topographical waves ebbing flowing enveloping stark white bleached bones on a shore line.

Arie Hellendoorn’s paintings are biological psychedelia, internal externalised

He uses the paint, actually uses it as paint and appreciates the medium for its unique characteristics. I haven’t been to a painting show in far too long and these works have really made me appreciate paint as a medium again.

{Suite} Gallery you’re awesome. Looking at the artist’s website (LOOK HERE) and starting from 2012, work backwards through his works. What a great insight in to the workings of an artists process. Performance, installation, object, and back to painting, I wonder what the next ten years will produce?

The best thing on Courtney Place

Max Bellamy
Carte Blanche
1:05 – HD video
Edition of 3

30 Upstairs, I read about this gallery on TheBigIdea (I think), and I finally went to a show on Thursday night. After talking to, hold on, listening to other people talk about Law at WYP networking cheap o’ wines (where’s my Man O’ War?) it was a great pleasure to sneak up the staircase beside El Horno and discover 30 Upstairs. I thought that I was going to see some of Max’s photos (because I can’t/don’t bother to read descriptions good and they work so well as stills) but it is actually five video works and two photographs, Borrowed Time is the name of the show, get there!

Can I say that I conducted an interview?

Broughton: Did you dress as a pilot while filming this?

Bellamy: No…

Listening to Max describe how exactly he achieved each shot which involved everything from zip lines to helium balloons and animation was a perfect accompaniment to orange slices and fetal spooning Campari. On edge of Fiordland National Park, the edge of civilisation, bounding through the beech forests and moss after a flying DSLR make believe passenger carrier preventing any dead camera body casualties and planes from smooching trees. Some of the shots in this remind me a lot of Home with the rattling little plane sailing along on its journey, and if you like this take a look at Microcosms.

Max Bellamy
Meme
0:24 loop – HD video
Edition of 3

The rat race that is Invercargill, McDonalds is frequented far more than the art gallery (that pyramid with Henry the Tuatara in it, who has his own blog?). This loop sits beside a film made at Monkey Island which took olympic feats of swimming, flying and gumboot wearing to make. In contrast, Meme is filmed from a stationary spot inside the William Hodges accommodation. Max is pretty flash just by the way, He was the William Hodges Resident in 2011 and stayed in the old white building overlooking the above, just off Gala Street.

I took my friend (also from Southland) to see both exhibitions today because I wanted to listen to the audio again without the excited chatter of an exhibition opening in the background. Interesting to note that neither of us saw Maroon; Blue as being an island because we were very familiar with the land formations in that area. It was wonderful to see someone appreciating the remoteness and inaccessibility (and Monkey-less-ness) of Monkey Island, and now we are both home sick.

I highly recommend braving 140km winds and torrents of water blowing out of the Dixon Street fountain to go and see this show. Follow up with a peanut butter (add chocolate) milkshake from Sweet Mothers Kitchen and some vege tortillas and you’ve just won Saturday.

Ruth Thomas-Edmond

Ruth Thomas-Edmond
Heaps

I immediately recognised this artists works from The Obstinate Object at City Gallery. I was going to say Ruth’s works but thats not how you address artists is it? It has to be like a rugby commentary but with more syllables and less rugby and runtogethersentences, because, it’s not live or anything. Oh but is it? Maybe there is a running commentary by Grant Fox playing through between my ears as I navigate my way around the cardboard shale and squint into the yellowyellow taped cut sliced cheese slice tapes squares on the wall.

Ruth Thomas-Edmond
Drawings for Artists Alliance 20th Birthday Project

I had to google Grant Fox to make sure he was a commentator. My rugby-art analogy was always going to succeed based on my extensive knowledge of staring blankly at both.

Her paintings are not unlike Melanie Bell’s, I think that I compare everything to those. That is what you do though, with the new; compare it to the next most similar thing your mind can dredge up, giving you the pleasure of familiarity to relate it back to.

You relate things back to your lived experience, and the feelings associated with whatever has triggered your memory come back in some sense too. (Scraping the back of my art-mind here, I forget the terms…). Maybe that is why I disliked John Nixon’s sci-fi plywood. Which should have its own category. We have primitive art, art of the insane, fine art, word art, degenerate art, modern art, cafe art. There should be fuck art.

147 Cuba Street

Fiona Pardington
Seaweed & Lemons
Inkjet print on hahnemule cotton rag
Edition of 10
2012

Suite treats on level 2 with Fiona Pardington’s velvety vanitas, Flora Fauna. They would compliment the interior of my dark dewy Wellington flat, complete with it’s own rotting fruit bowl.  There is an almost scopophilic pleasure derived from looking at these overripe fruits, fermenting, dripping sugar, glistening and round. Eat your heart out Calendar Girls.

Go and see this show and lap it up, go twice, put a deposit down on this one for me.

Down on level one at Enjoy On The Count of Three! is showing three video works by Manukau Institute of Technology graduates Candice Stock, Jeremy Leatinu’u and tanya Ruka, curated by Rebecca Hobbs and Richard Orjis.

Candice Stock -Are you with me?

My favourite thing about Enjoy is that they show video works! Covers 2009, by Jeremy Leatinu’u really resonated with me. How obscene it was to watch culture as commodity being pimped between packed tables of Palangi’s, arms out-stretched squinting concentrated through a digi-cam LCD screen at this wonderful spectacle. I’ve got a good camera. Yeah, its got a setting for fireworks and its pink. Fuck off.

Candice Stock is a total babe, her dress ups are enviable gorgeous colour coordinated 80’s synth Bowie dance wonders. I would love to see more of her work, and be in it, around it, have it all over my face.