Dugout Kate Newby, Lauren Winstone, Nicholas Mangan, Nicola Farquhar, Sam Rountree Williams

Dugout
Kate Newby, Lauren Winstone, Nicholas Mangan, Nicola Farquhar, Sam Rountree Williams
05 Apr – 05 May 2012
Auckland

Hopkinson Cundy is pleased to present Dugout; a group exhibition featuring new work by Nicola Farquhar, Nicholas Mangan, Kate Newby, Sam Rountree Williams, and Lauren Winstone.

For Dugout Sam Rountree Williams presents a new large painting titled Isthmus. The surface of the work is laden with methodically placed clam shells, covered in parts with irregular spray-paint that melts into wobbly landscapes or cartographic forms. Rountree’s work is a sustained and earnest engagement with the ground of painting disrupted by an uncomfortably kitsch material of hobbyist art. Charting the rocky terrain between ‘European’ and ‘New Zealand’ art histories, Rountree’s works are contradictions between ordered design and chance-derived texture, between the contrived and organic.

Nicholas Mangan’s Some Kinds of Duration takes, as subject and material, Walter Burley Griffin’s Pyrmont incinerator: a now-demolished structure in urban Sydney used to dispose of the city’s paper waste. At Hopkinson Cundy, Mangan presents a new film featuring photocopied archive material (all that remains of the building) set to the rhythm and sound of a photocopy machine. The film is accompanied by a new sculpture; a concrete cast of a Canon photocopier toner drum stained with carbon pigment. Mangan draws this connection through carbon — the incinerator destroying and reducing matter to carbon, and a photocopier using carbon to reproduce and record.

Kate Newby’s work has often declared a commitment to mobility, improvisation and self-sufficiency. Her new sets of ceramic sticks are crudely crafted from clay and textured by the artist’s hand, or decorated with scratches from various implements found around the studio. Newby’s frequent use of incidental marks signal an engagement with the texture of the ‘everyday’ and an interplay between the mediated experience of the gallery, and the ordinary vitality of life lived just outside.

For Nicola Farquhar painting is a process of building or re-building people. Each figure is constructed with layered pieces of colour; some features –cheekbones, foreheads, chins- are buried or smudged away, while others -eyes, noses, teeth– are highlighted to disquieting effect. In this recent series the backgrounds and clothing remember earlier forms of modern art (the flat patterning of Synthetism and strong colours of Fauvism, for example) where the faces seem far more ancient and alien.

Lauren Winstone’s new works continue her ongoing investigation into, or re-reading of, the ceramic pot. This series of five small stoneware sculptures, collectively titled No possible wholes, take the pot’s two basic features –a base and a rim– and inverts, dislocates and rebuilds these forms into new sculptural thoughts. Winstone’s forms protrude, retract, and fold back on themselves, in an ongoing and intricate struggle for balance.