Nowhere to Somewhere

VOYEUR: Photographer Tom Teutenberg’s unframed colour picture is pinned to the wall, a presentation as clean and sparse as the image that features a yellow parka laid over an ice bin for fish in a typically industrial setting. Titled I Know What You Did Last Summer, the primary-coloured forms have a mordant relationship but it’s hard to tell what’s going on under the parka. “It’s almost a voyeuristic thing where Tom’s seen something happen. He’s almost part of the scene,” says Nache. Picture by Tom Teutenberg

A COLONY of surveillance cameras on the ceiling of the entrance space watch visitors at the Nowhere to Somewhere exhibition at the Paul Nache Gallery. At least, the minion-like cameras would keep an eye on people if they were not carved from wood and painted by artist Glen Hayward.

“They’re meant to be watching you but they are tricks, a trompe d’oeil,” says gallery owner Matt Nache.

Hayward is one of 30 artists represented in the first Paul Nache Gallery exhibition of 2018, Nowhere to Somewhere, in which the raw and the sophisticated rub shoulders.

In several instances they are the same thing in this wildly eclectic show. Works range from naive artist Catherine August’s paintings of figures on wood to Teresa HR Lane’s mixed media exploration of confused gender identities.

With an exhibition of work by 30 artists, some with multiple pieces, curating the show, and discovering their connections, has been an experience and experiment, says Nache.

An A4 catalogue outlines artists in order of appearance on entry to the exhibition but works are not accompanied by descriptive labels or prices.

“People need to feel the art rather than being directed to labels and prices. You have to stop and negotiate the space and what the work is doing. It slows everything down. It’s a dialogue with the artwork.”

The challenge was to find the “red thread” that runs through everything, says Nache, riffing on the Chinese legend says that people who are supposed to meet are connected by an invisible red thread since before birth.

The “red thread” is no more apposite than in Dr William Peters’ framed schema of the four fish gill arches and of an axial diagram based on his hypothesis that the design of the human circulatory system is at the heart, so to speak, of human evolution. That the circulation pattern, and the way electrically-charged particles in the bloodstream work, ultimately determined the human form. (For more details see The Gisborne Herald story From Fish to Man).

That thread could link with a group of three works at the opposite end of the gallery by Brian Campbell and John Walsh. In Campbell’s characteristically cartoonish and slightly surreal painting, upright monkeys disembark from a boat to bring their belongings to shore. In one of Walsh’s two paintings a figure stands on a deep riverbed, or in someone’s subconscious, and hauls towards him in a giant hinaki (eel pot), a protesting fish.

With its glacial blue hole, blinding white light surrounded by subterranean darkness and what looks like a small whare with smoking chimney way below, the third piece among the trio of paintings is enigmatic.