(Gallery Thirty Three, Wānaka)
The sun rises over a dark land, a golden glow merging into the last remnants of the night. With typically precise lines and a soft, almost velvety blending of colour, Richard Adams’s Kare Kare is the least abstracted work in his current exhibition "Dimensions", but still pares back any extraneous detail, creating a lingering sense of calm and infinite space.
Adams has always been a master at using lines and angles to foster a certain atmosphere — in the compositions with horizontal bands of colour, the viewer’s eye naturally moves more slowly, "reading" across the canvas, and instinctively trying to look forward, into the scene. Conversely, in most of the works in this collection, the imagery is shattered, fragmented into blocks of colour, scored with sketched, curving marks and overlapping edges; the eye is kept in constant motion, moving in every direction.
There’s a collage effect to works like Blood Moon, as if snapshots of a scene, taken over different times of the day and night, from various angles, have been jumbled and layered — and it does reflect how we experience a landscape, both in the moment and over time. When we stand looking at any scene, our eyes and minds are rapidly processing an infinite number of tiny details, all the physical senses colliding at once — and when we look back on that time, it will always be slightly fragmented in our memory, certain details crisper, coming to the forefront, and others receding into murky uncertainty.
(Gallery Thirty Three, Wanaka)
At the top of ascending stairways and craggy precipices, Di Tocker’s cast-glass figures sit in conversation and silence with themselves and each other. There’s a peaceful stillness and a weighty resonance to Tocker’s work, where the viewer shares that sensation of rising above extraneous noise, taking a deep breath, and really listening to what’s important. As they catch the light, the sculptures seem to harness all of the elements, with trapped air bubbles suspended in the smooth, translucent surfaces, and the pale blue figures in Elevated Conversation I giving the illusion of being made from chiselled ice.
In the Elevated Conversation pieces, Tocker’s anonymous, universal people sit or stand on eroding platforms and rocky peaks, seemingly oblivious to the potential dangers below, lost in thought and meaningful dialogue. That entwining of calm serenity and powerful force is reflected in the glass medium itself — inherently vulnerable to destruction, yet also solid and substantial, forged through a lengthy, loud, and sometimes hazardous process.
The pensive figures in Intermission I and Intermission II each sit at the top of a flight of stairs, the works designed to either stand alone or be situated together, creating an entirely new silhouette where the subjects ascend from different sides and sit in company, a monologue becoming a dialogue. En masse, all of Tocker’s glass figures could be interpreted to be speaking to each other from their own land masses, sitting high enough that any differences below seem unimportant.
(Hullabaloo Art Space, Cromwell)
The current collection at Cromwell’s Hullabaloo Art Space showcases a number of dreamy, atmospheric landscapes, in a variety of media from oils to resin, photography and ceramics. Lorraine Higgins’s Reflections is a gorgeous, misty scene, the shadowy shapes of trees emerging from dove-grey clouds, and the reflections in the water touched with hints of iridescent rainbow. The highly textural surface, with paint allowed to drip down the canvas, adds to the sense of looking at the scene through light rainfall. In works like Afternoon Walk by the Lake and Murmuration Series #1, Higgins coats the surface of the painted canvas in resin, creating an incredibly effective translucent sheen over rippling water and a pink-streaked sky.
With her ceramic pieces Hawea Landscape and Topography, Sue Rutherford uses textural swirls, raised edges, and thick application of colour to mimic the topography of the land. As you move around the vessels, your eye picks out the veining of leaves, the suggestion of clustered branches and footprints, and the reflective depths of water.
Photographer Eric Schusser’s Towards Hāwea is almost cinematic in scale and composition, the clouds swirling ominously above a wide, majestic landscape, light breaking through to bathe the mountain peaks in a silvery glow. His lens positions the viewer at the perfect central point in the perspective, the eye travelling forward over the open plains towards the waiting peaks, as if a potential journey is opening up like a storybook.
By Laura Elliott
