21 September - 20 October

Two Rooms is pleased to present an exhibition by Ruth Watson, her first solo exhibition in Auckland for 16 years. Watson returned to NZ last year after spending 12-years abroad in Berlin, Sydney and Canberra.

For over twenty years now, Watson has worked with cartographic ideas and imagery as a major basis for her work. From emerging artist projects such as Planetarium at Artspace in 1989 to work made for Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific in 2003, her work has consistently engaged with these concerns, particularly the image of the world.

Watson seeks to present alternative worldviews, often via little known map projections, by engaging with the topic of mapping itself. In her exhibition at Two Rooms, Unsafe Ruth will present a major floor installation constructed from miniature glass balls (the type used for reflection on the roads) along with a related body of drawings that discuss these issues.

In her twelve-year absence from New Zealand Watson’s work was included in several prestigious exhibitions including two Australian Perspecta (national survey) exhibitions, the Tom Sokolowski- curated Lest We Forget, a show of six artists that also included Christian Boltanski and Yasunara Morimura, in New York City, and several shows in Germany including the 1996 major NZ exhibition Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art from New Zealand. Watson has also had over 25 solo exhibitions and was included in the 1992 Sydney Biennale, the 1995 Cheju Korean Biennale, the first Auckland Triennale in 2001, and in 2004 “Telecom Prospect: Recent New Zealand Art”, and two surveys of Australian art: the Sydney-based Australian “Perspecta” in both 1997 and 1999.

Along with the success of Watson’s extensive exhibition history she has been the recipient of several awards, including the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Award in 1992, a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Fellowship in 1993, the international 2005 Ristow Prize in cartographic history for a study of the first map of the world to use the term ‘Terra Australis Incognita’. Watson’s artworks are represented in major public collections in New Zealand, including Te Papa Tongarewa and the Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Watson has a BFA in Painting from the University of Canterbury (1984), a MVA from Sydney College of the Arts (1999) and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Australian National University, Canberra (2005). She returned to NZ to take up a position as a Lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts.

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25th October - 24th November 2007

Joachim Bandau   Joyce Campbell   James Cousins   Jane Harris   Megan Jenkinson

Andrei Jewell   Peata Larkin   Julia Morison   Paul Morrison   Denis O’Connor

Our relationship with light and colour has long been one of the most essential elements in the history of art. Artists have found ways to transmit, generate and even pulsate light through simple techniques of manipulating colour intensity, brushstroke and pattern.Spectacular optical displays can occur in nature when extreme geographical and atmospheric conditions collide. In the Antarctic, freezing temperatures and low humidity produce dancing columns of light of various hues known as the auroras. Even more elusive and strange are the Marfa lights. Rare sightings of these ghostly lights describe brightly coloured glowing balls floating above the ground: a sort of mirage possibly caused by sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air. Halos, or ice bows, are another optical phenomena that appear near or around the Sun or Moon, and are caused by light refracted through ice crystals in cold clouds.The artists in this exhibition, while exploiting the nature of light, are also exploring the mysteries of optical phenomena and the mechanism of the retina in the reception of visual images.Denis O’Connor draws with light onto striated onyx. The Plumassier (the feather trader) forms a glowing arrow that leads you into the exhibition.Megan Jenkinson with a work from her Atmospheric Optics series, uses billowing fabric in rich greens, reds and yellows to create an aurora above frozen Antarctic landscapes. She uses a lenticular process to describe these flickering and ephemeral effects. In this process the digital image is laminated on to very finely ridged plastic, so that from front on everything is present, but with any change of viewing angle the aurora disappears.James Cousin’s soft focus landscapes appear to have been filtered through a sophisticated optical lens, fragmenting the forms into shards of light or hypnotic spirals.Paul Morrison has a scientific fascination with the botanic, however his interpretation is to turn green to black and white, creating magnified visions alternating between positive and negative. He confuses our retinal processes. His film Cambium is monochromatic yet manipulated in such a way that it is full of contrasts, introducing a new focus on light and shadow.Joachim Bandau’s series of watercolors use overlapping rectangles of black wash to create a unified black field that plays tricks with our depth of field. By altering our visual perceptions the layers defy a sense of focus creating works both fragile and intangible.Joyce Campbell creates photographic murals that draw viewers into an endless, self-generating world of crystalline wells and passages. In her work Brittle City she presents a massively enlarged photograph of a crystal encrusted sculptural model.Peata Larkin’s light boxes are constructed with acrylic paint pushed though a simple mesh creating geometric abstractions which show the influence of the digital world and the breakdown of visual images into pixilated forms.Andrei Jewell, photographer and filmmaker, presents photographs from his Holiwater series filmed in India on the Ganges River. A single red thread is pulled across the water to symbolize the one stringed instrument of classical Indian musicians. The thread vibrates with the pull of the river but also ambiguously becomes a shaft and generator of light.Julia Morison’s Intaglio etchings, Flotsam and Jetsam pay homage to the Koru paintings of Gordon Walters. She interweaves organic matter around negative geometric structures echoing both the surrealist and Op art movements.Jane Harris creates dazzling paintings pulsating with light. With clever brushwork she controls the reflection of light to such an extent that the figure/ground relationship of the work constantly shifts. Flat surfaces jump into three dimensions.Download: Press release with images PDF Afterimage_Two_Rooms_Oct_07.pdf

September 26 - October 21 2006

The Arrival is an international exploration of cultural adaptation, upheaval and displacement, either by imposition or choice. Contemplating the rippling after-effects of more than two centuries of cultural migration, this exhibition examines the implications of arrivals into new worlds, journeys to old, and the contemplation of unfamiliar frontiers.

Surprisingly, globalisation hasn’t caused the relativity of historic perspective to become homogenised but instead has made it increasingly complex. Successive waves of cultural expansion have left layers of indelible imprints in the landscape, resulting in a complex overlaying of social and ecological systems. Contemporary Western art once hinged on the singular advance of Modernism, propelled by industrialisation and often influenced by so-called primitive art. Subsequent readings of cultural identity must negotiate the travel and translation of signs and symbols, complicated by cultural resilience or diasporic acclimatisation.

According to Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, the industrial revolution, which underpinned Modernism, was largely fuelled by the colonisation of resources found in the ‘New World’, which has in turn accelerated the process of globalisation. The impact of these false notions of progress and misjudged political alliances are architectural relics that leave lasting scars on the landscape and psyche, commemorating both empires and ruins. As successive civilisations rise and fall, these shifting sands remain indelibly marked with the ghostly presence of previous eras of exploration, invasion and development.

Using video, photography and sculpture, the artists in this exhibition play the role of observer and social anthropologist, offering insight into global processes that have led to urban industrialisation and social dysfunction. They document legacies of the outmoded belief systems and bankrupted ideals that have created a world of imbalances, misunderstandings, and crises of identity. Side-stepping didactic rhetoric for a more fluid approach to the detailed perspectives of cultural exchange, their work is haunted by lost dreams and despair whilst still suggesting humour, irony, and the potential of the future that inspires all migration.

The Arrivals includes artists Mark Adams (NZ), Allan DeSouza (Kenya), Merilyn Fairskye (Australia), Brett Graham (NZ), Zwelethu Mthethwa (South Africa), Lisa Reihana (NZ), Haruhika Sameshima (NZ) and Bridget Smith (UK).

17 Aug - 15 Sept 2007

Two Rooms presents the first in an annual series of painting exhibitions. The artists on display here use systems, rules, historical reference and a ritualistic engagement in the process of painting in order to emphasise its materiality. Surface is what matters.

The protagonists are three artists from the UK, Basil Beattie, Jane Harris and Alexis Harding; three artists from New Zealand, Bill Riley, Luise Fong and Murray Green joining Marcia Hafif, from New York. Marcia Hafif, whose work is pivotal to this exhibition, has for nearly forty years been concerned with the possibilities of monochrome painting. She has produced a meticulous inventory of types of paints and supports used throughout the history of painting and her pioneering work with colour and the use of hand ground pigments has set the standard for many painters.

It would seem the great challenge to painting in 2007 is its long tradition. What can we paint now? Two Rooms prefers not What but more How to paint, with these seven painters concerned purely with the material and physical nature of a painting. However this is not exactly back to the basics of application and materials. Paint is not the inert substance it appears to be and can take on a life of its own despite the use of preordained rules. There is a great deal of play and performance going on here. Spots, drips, pours, stripes, grids, patterns, leaks, skins, blobs, tangles, accidents, hand gestures, and brush marks are all the order of the day. And as for the materials there is aluminium, wood, canvas, resin, wax, paint, gesso, pigment, carborundum, perspex, acrylic, fabric and wallpaper. The inventory is forever expanding; stretchers are made from the traditional wood, aluminium, and even no stretcher at all. At times the paint seems barely attached to the support. However despite all best efforts to concentrate on painting as a material fact the resulting works demonstrate that paint can be humorous, emotional, intellectual and very alive.

Marcia Hafif: Marcia Hafif’s painting gets by with a minimum of effort. The paint is built up on the canvas brushstroke upon brushstroke, until the entire surface is covered. The high degree of uniformity demands a concentrated and continuous working method allowing no lengthy interruptions. The works require a certain, perhaps what could be called contemplative, state of mind. Painting here is understood as a ritual act in which the paint assumes form through personal gesture. SABINE MULLER Opening speech for the exhibition, Artothek, Koeln, 1995.

Alexis Harding: exploits the incompatibility between two different painting media to create dynamic and emotive compositions, which over time reach their own equilibrium as they slip down their support.

Jane Harris: work is developed through a lengthy and obsessive process of tightly concentric brush strokes applied in multiple layers and worked in wet oil paint. The process itself sets up a series of playful dichotomies and internal tensions. The paintings are both highly controlled and optically unstable.

Basil Beattie: Large inventive abstracts in oil and wax adopting a system of pictographic signs as a means to use gestural techniques in applying and removing rich layers of paint.

Luise Fong: applies restrained pours of gesso onto monochromes infused with carborundum. In Fong’s new works, by carefully drilling, eroding and abrading the surface she emphasises her control over these elegant paintings.

Murray Green: paintings are characterized by an inventive alchemy of paint and resin. The underlying painterly structure is randomly built up with dense layers and then left to naturally slip, ooze and fall from the support. To preserve and contain this action Green carefully pours resin over these sculptural candy-like drips permitting only some of the under painting to be visible. What happens at the surface is a beautiful yet strange tension between the uncontrollable and the controlled.

Bill Riley: works are painted with obsessive precision onto mirrored aluminium panels. Reflective surfaces supply the paintings with a hard-to-control inner light, playing optical tricks and bouncing the viewer’s gaze back with vibrant colour. The surface asserts itself unpredictably in response to changes in ambient light.