by Mark Amery

We've seen a significant increase in contemporary art projects steered by emerging artists and curators in Wellington of late. While spaces like Enjoy, Neut and the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery provide some display for this activity, there's a lot of energy bubbling underneath - shifting clusters of artists, new urban interventionist strategies and temporary gallery spaces.

Reprinted with thanks from the Dominion Post 27/08/04by Mark Amery

We've seen a significant increase in contemporary art projects steered by emerging artists and curators in Wellington of late. While spaces like Enjoy, Neut and the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery provide some display for this activity, there's a lot of energy bubbling underneath - shifting clusters of artists, new urban interventionist strategies and temporary gallery spaces.

Reprinted with thanks from the Dominion Post 27/08/04Partly attributable to the establishment of a fine arts degree at Massey, its also part and parcel of an art practice that is no longer defined publicly just by the existing public and private gallery framework. Alternative exhibition practises may trace their lineage back locally to 'post-object' art projects of the '70s, but artists are exploring their art in new spaces in Wellington like never before. Contemporary art is finding space to live between institutions and established property - fertilising in the cracks between the smooth paving stones.

This emergent end of the arts industry is self-regulatory. The unwritten laws and heirachies of the art world are self-imposed, urban jungle style. It allows artists and curators to establish their reputation without waiting for admittance from the institutions. Likewise we should see a growth in contemporary art's young urban audience - empowered to decide an object's worth based on how it affects them, rather than by a gallery's price list or a wall panel.

There are signs of this local scene starting to mature with two current exhibitions. The artists' work is assured and they sit with strength within non-commercial spaces. Show opened early this year and is to be found in an office block at the end of Nigges Ave, off Vivian Street. Found is the right word. The gallery's presense is marked only by a rough sign in an adjacent carpark. This is the sort of dead-end alley dominated by scaffolding and airvents, grafitti and security guards. An old battered villa holds in there next to the office block, like one last tooth in a row of new falsies. Just the sort of contested urban zone that new art thrives in.

Surface Tension (until September 4) features work brought together by curators Courtney Lucas and assistant curator Daniel Du Bern. Three artists and two curators in a bedroom-sized room might sound like art gone ridiculously precious in its arrangement, but this is one of the best-looking and most engaging group shows I've seen in a while.

Kate Wyatt's work provided for me a strong visceral evocation of the emotional prickliness and physical unease of adolescense. In the drawings, line shoots up like a forest fire of underarm air, urgent and disruptive in its growth. A swing hangs empty while beneath it a knot of flowers grow wild. A tree erupts out of a mattress. On the opposing wall rows of actual tiny mattresses are arranged on the wall, all in varied states of wear. Each holds stories of our most private activities.

Wyatt's evocation of the life of the body and its secrets was well matched in its sensory associations with Marina Cain's installation. Welcomed into a bowery of cotton thread, on these threads dangle tiny animal claws like questions marks. On the floor blood appears to ooze out from a computer screen partially submerged in the floor. The surface tension here feels like it could cut into you down to the bone.

Vivien Atkinson takes the domestic idea of putting a pin into the world map for every location you've been, and transposes it onto the gallery's bare walls. Reminiscent of British artist's Emma Kay's drawing of the world from memory, Atkinson has pinned up her constellation of places from memory - but on this map only those places that she has visited - and that she considers to be places - exist. Africa is but a short trickle down the Nile. This work also has a personal charge about it, marking out a biography through cartography and playing out the factual tension between the truths and untruths of perception.

Meanwhile the Shift Trust have begun a series of site-specific art projects with an installation of nine Wellington artists in an abandoned office space at 60 Kent Terrace. The Ouse Project reminds me that it's the ten year anniversary of Terry Urbahn making art out of the detritus in an abandoned Cuba Street Hotel as part of the National Gallery's Art Now exhibition.

At Ouse the artists respond as a group to another deadened industrial space and its detritus, amplifying its character and chipping away at its embedded memory. There's a strong sense of a space like this becoming possessed once it is abandoned, and the strong work stands out for its ability to both capture your attention and resonantly riff off the poetics of the existing space and its past life. Of note in this respect for me were Kaleb Bennett's subtle architectural interventions, and both Regan Gentry's veneer-paneled coffin turned chair, and mountain range of rubble, buckling a table of ironing boards beneath it.

Reprinted with permission from The Dominion Post 27/08/04