Inside Outside Upside DownOctober 28 - November 22, 2014 
Inside Outside Upside Down – that’d be a sculptor’s title. We’re expected to look here from all angles for the best effect – and in the case of Gait, that may well be down on our knees.
Gait is an unexpected delight. Like a hermit crab carrying its home, the weight of corten bears down on lathed lengths of matai. Creosote has been rubbed on to the wood to echo the rich, rusty patina of the corten steel, so the piece will be at home both inside and out. The whole is a lovely balance of mass borne and mass resisted.
Braid, a slightly bigger and more complex weld of corten, has a similar sense of weight and compression. Spun rounds of aluminium shimmer with silvered light from confines tight within slabs of steel. Sightlines offer ways through, as Parsons delicately brings together or braids, one might say, forms both rectilinear and circular.
Duopoly is lighter in feel (which is just as well as it is up on the wall.) Lengths of black anodized aluminium and brown wood (kwila) are placed around a brushed stainless steel frame. We cannot see how they are fixed. So like magnets they stand or hang, in a Mondrian-like dance about an imaginary grid. It’s a piece full of touch and movement around a horizontal visual field.
List of works:
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The stacked works in the show, both leaning and screwed to the wall, comprise rounds of variously coloured plastics, metal and wood threaded onto a spindle. Industrial plastics can be a splendid thing. Their colour, density and variety sing in quite surprising ways. The look is both decorous and rich – the palette of Maori Modernists like Arnold Wilson meets sparkplug, skytower and sci-fi. Nice: out of Auckland, NZ via the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts at Ilam, and New York.
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© Copyright 2006 by Jonathan Smart Gallery. Address: 52 Buchan Street, Sydenham, Christchurch 8023, New Zealand. Tel: +64 3 3657070 Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Friday 11:00am – 5:00pm, Saturday 11:00am – 3:00pm |
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