Opening: Peter Robinson - Charcoal Drawing
Schedule
Sat Sep 07 2024 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
Location
91 Dent street, Whangārei Town Basin, Whangarei, New Zealand 0110 | Whangarei, NO
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Join us at Whangārei Art Museum from 6-8pm, Saturday 7 September, for the opening of Charcoal Drawing, a large-scale exhibition by Peter Robinson across both of our gallery spaces.Physically imposing yet also vaguely laughable, the burnt-wood-veneer aluminium works in this exhibition call back to Robinson’s previous engagements with obstinately artificial materials, such as polystyrene and felt. However, compared to the almost histrionic theatricality of some older works, these “charcoal drawings” are comically dour, although it would be a mistake to interpret this faux-minimalist posture as purely ironic. The miserable artificiality of the materials on display here–grim, production-line facsimiles of a half-remembered natural world–does not negate their status as art objects; on the contrary, by building an exhibition entirely around these quasi-sculptural superstructures, Robinson encourages the viewer to really consider them, to focus on their qualities as objects and allow their implications to gradually unwind from there. Look, he seems to say, see how the veneer cracks and buckles when I fold the metal. See how quickly the illusion is dispelled, yet how flexible and resilient the underlying matter actually is.
A brief examination of Robinson’s recent works helps to further untangle the journey that led to Charcoal Drawing. In the last handful of years, his long-standing concerns with, and criticisms of, the politics of identity have seemingly been channelled and directed–or, perhaps, incarnated–into the realm of materiality, while losing nothing of his characteristic iconoclasm. In 2020, his exhibitions Rag Trade and Notations took an aggressive, maximalist approach to the idea of material deconstruction, leading to galleries strewn with seemingly-discarded scraps of cloth and metal entangled with broken plastic furniture. In these shows the chaotic, frightening sociopolicial energies of the new decade were made blindingly manifest, sublimated into a jagged, raw-edged physicality.
As the 2020s wear on, Robinson’s work has begun to address the decade’s pervasive sense of continually accelerating material decay and social disruption differently. In 2023’s Kā Kaihōpara, new structures began to emerge from the chaos, gangly, familiar spiralling forms created by bending rectangular-cross section aluminium beams. Crucially, however, these structures did not exist in a vacuum, but were contextualised (or, indeed, contested) by a cacophonous Greek chorus of other voices emanating from the works on the walls, some of which were Robinson’s and some those of his friends and whānau. This element of community or multiplicity is perhaps crucial to understanding Robinson’s new direction, in that it reintroduces elements of dialogue, uncertainty and reciprocity to the proceedings. However, this is an offline, tangible language, quite different from the kind of linguistic point-scoring that so often leads to frighteningly unpredictable real-world misery. An opportunity for kōrero, not debate.
As an artist whose reputation was built in part on works that commented on Pākeha anxieties about Māori and Māori anxieties about those anxieties, it is understandable that Robinson might seek to re-imagine his role in the contemporary political landscape. It seems that, rather than attempting to engage with the bottomless well of the online commentary vortex, which affords endless opportunities for outrage and psycho-social violence undreamt of in 1990s New Zealand, Robinson has wisely chosen to move the battle to a place of his own choosing, namely the physical gallery space, redolent of floor cleaner and bulk-bought white acrylic paint. In the present climate, perhaps the most constructive action one can take is to disconnect from cyclical, algorithmic modes of thought and instead focus on the physical world, which still exists as a discrete entity, separate from its digital nightmare-self.
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Where is it happening?
91 Dent street, Whangārei Town Basin, Whangarei, New Zealand 0110, New ZealandEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
