Artist John Reynolds. Photo / John McIver
When Nick Cave's notoriously wild band The Birthday Party played Auckland's Mainstreet in 1981, young John Reynolds was despatched by the Listener to take their photo. The shoot was at 9.30am, and the band gave the bouncy, ebullient photographer - now one of our most accomplished, diverse artists - a united front of the grumps.
"I had a tough time with him," recalls Reynolds. "They were very wooden, they didn't want to be photographed, they were hungover, seedy and young. So I just put my camera in their faces and hoped they wouldn't hit me."
That encounter didn't deter Reynolds. He is a true Nick Cave devotee, with a couple of works in his show Epistomadologies, at Auckland Art Gallery, referencing snatches of lyrics by the Australian singer-songwriter, but slightly mashed up.
He points to one in the corridor on level one of the gallery, where the 68 A1 works are lined up on facing walls. The words, written with a black oil stick, read: "Where is Michael, Where is Mark, Where is Matthew, Now it's getting dark", from Cave's song Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow. He has added, "Where is John?"
"I like the way that Nick Cave gets very sonorous, church-like space inside his songs that often flip from morals into faith in that way he does so richly," he says. "So these are real saints and this is a confused artist."
On the contrary, Reynolds is very clear. Epistomadologies takes its tongue-tangling title from James Joyce's writings on "epistemology" - the theory of knowledge, and the church term for methodology - but Joyce deliberately misspelt the word, inserting "mad" in the middle.
"This is what drives you mad, the inherent meaningless of our lives and our desperate search for meaning," says Reynolds. "This work is not about Joyce but I like the way he talks about his work. I was reading about him the other day. He was talking about the difference between Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. He said Ulysses was a daylight book and Finnegan's Wake a night-time book. I like to call these works a walk in the moonlight. They are on metallic paper, they have got a sheen."
They are also 14 years old. Originally totalling 91 works, they were first shown at Artspace in 2001 and earned Reynolds a place as a finalist in the first Walters Prize in 2002 (he is also an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate). Epistomadologies then moved on to the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, and Auckland Art Gallery Patrons bid to buy the lot. Unfortunately, the AAG decided it also wanted to spend its budget on other works so picked up just 22 from the original 91. Reynolds regrets breaking them up.
"I should have said take it all or none. Then my dealer [Sue Crockford] was very happy to sell some; she sold about 22. When Sue Crockford closed, I kept the remaining ones in my studio and I've been thinking about what to do with them and, with some regret, that we hadn't kept them all together. Then out of the blue, Natasha [Conland, curator at Auckland Art Gallery] rang me and said we're going to put this show on. It was so weird. So now is my chance to donate them. The ones that are missing, they may come back in some form or another."
Reynolds regards the works as pages that aren't numbered. When they went up on the wall at Artspace in 2001, they were placed in a specific order "but fraught with random loops and hopping and dancing".
Now the order is random. Some feature Reynolds' instantly recognisable signposts featuring a bunch of real New Zealand place names. The "A" signs include names like Anawhata, where the Reynolds family has a bach; Aramoana, where he used to go and visit Ralph Hotere; Ararimu, "a nice wine". Anxiety Point is in there, too, the unofficial name for a remote coastal spot in Southland, "a place I'd like to visit but not to live there", laughs Reynolds.
"There is a poetry that I was trying to create. The meaning is both personal and banal. The whole thing is quite frail, too. You don't get signs like this with all the places in one direction and all these places won't be all be down this way so I am trying to organise knowledge in a meaningful way and getting it wrong."
Reynolds uses an oil stick to create the images. "It's hard to control, oil sticks are like a big thumb, it's not fluid. It fights against you. That gives me a certain kind of vigour. It looks very offhand and loose but in actual fact there is a tension making them and there is an austerity in the way they come together."
When Reynolds created these works, he lost himself during "a pretty intense couple of months. I don't plan it all out, the work makes itself."
So why, he still asks himself, did he start making grids in some of the pieces? "Were they longitudes? Are they on a map? Or, as Natasha says, are they on a gauze, a strange curtain?"
Other pieces have a clearer source: phonetic words from Amazing Grace; a list of New Zealand weather descriptives placed against a "badly drawn" reproduction of a gothic Spanish tree; words from a dictionary of text words, "those words like LOL"; dashes like Braille; and letters copied from his young nephew's early efforts to learn how to write.
"He did this drawing with all these Os and Ws and I copied it faithfully as if it was a Biblical tract but that was exactly how he was practising language. The question is: where is the meaning? The whole thing is an enquiry, a pedestrian walk that asks questions but the whole thing becomes a little bit off-skew, a little lunatic and that's the link back to Joyce's 'mad'."
Reynolds is thrilled to see the works on the wall in the gallery, together again after such a long absence.
"It's lovely to see it because you are constantly occupied with what you are doing right now. It's funny to walk back into something you did 14 years ago and think, 'Why did I do that? Why was I so interested in that?'."
Reynolds is always making art inspired by what engages him. In 2011, he created a remarkable body of work based on his experiences of sailing up to the Kermadecs and Tonga on the HMNZS Otago with a group of eight other artists to support the establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary.
The trip was initiated by the Washington-based charitable trust Pew Environment Group Global Ocean Legacy, which is pushing for a 620,000sq km marine reserve within New Zealand's exclusive economic zone. Back then, the National Government, which had a minister on board the Otago for the trip, made all the right noises but has still taken no action. The exhibition, which came out of that trip continues to tour the country, and is showing now at Whangarei Art Museum until the end of August.
"I'm about to make another sort of postscript to that whole body of work for the Tauranga Art Gallery," says Reynolds. "It's going to be more political engagement with our hopeless Government and the intransigence of this way that they don't seem to understand how important it is to preserve the oceans."
What: Epistomadologies by John Reynolds
Where and when: Auckland Art Gallery, to November 1
He starred in shows like Nip/Tuck and Home and Away.