Courtesy of the Dominion Post - 10th December 2004

by Mark Amery

In the Autumn Art New Zealand critic Rebecca Rice commented, "Some might say that Wellington needs new exhibition spaces as much as it needs another Malaysian restaurant". As a lover of Malaysian food I can inform Rice that more wouldn't go amiss.
 
More exhibition space is welcome, and this year we got it. New public gallery Show has provided exhibitions for mid-career installation artists who don't get the development space they need, while two new dealers, Mark Hutchins and Mary Newton Gallery, have filled the void left by the loss of Jensen, Brian Queenin and Brooker galleries in the late 1990s.

Image: Megan Campbell Shadow - magic realism at Mary Newton GalleryCourtesy of the Dominion Post - 10th December 2004

by Mark Amery

In the Autumn Art New Zealand critic Rebecca Rice commented, "Some might say that Wellington needs new exhibition spaces as much as it needs another Malaysian restaurant". As a lover of Malaysian food I can inform Rice that more wouldn't go amiss.
 
More exhibition space is welcome, and this year we got it. New public gallery Show has provided exhibitions for mid-career installation artists who don't get the development space they need, while two new dealers, Mark Hutchins and Mary Newton Gallery, have filled the void left by the loss of Jensen, Brian Queenin and Brooker galleries in the late 1990s.

Image: Megan Campbell Shadow - magic realism at Mary Newton GalleryGiven the quality of Wellington based artists exhibiting in these galleries, you would certainly hope there is a local market for their work. Or are we condemned to continue to send our finest to Auckland without a looksee first?
 
Mary Newton opened last month in a former drycleaners on Vivian Street, across the road from the tattered remains of the city's red light strip. They've begun with two lively and eclectic group exhibitions that give some pointers as to dealers Paula Newton and Mary-Jane Duffy's interests. Newton is formerly of the Dowse and Duffy of City Gallery, and both have more recently worked in art acquisitions for the Ministry of Trade and Foreign Affairs - excellent places to observe dealer practise and build relationships with artists.
 
Dealers of high standing are often individuals, but there have also been some successful double acts (Gow Langsford, Brooke Gifford and Bartley Nees). Always however there's the sense to the world at large of a singular vision.  It's early days, but with these two exhibitions there's enough personality to assume that Mary Newton is a real person (indeed, I am told an artist is working on a portrait of what she might look like).
 
First up, this is a gallery that reflects the pluralism of current contemporary art practise. One that has moved beyond a hierarchy of certain media and materials, and judges artists on their relevance to the world at large rather than their relationship to recognised movements.

The artists represented challenge traditional frames. There is, as the Dowse has long championed, an emphasis on object-based art and artists of distinctive individual vision (many often using a style tagged naïve or visionary) who bring together composite influences. Compared to other dealers, Mary Newton messes around with art historical hierarchies something chronic.

In the first group show, Dry Clean Only Simon Shepherd made paintings out of synthetic cat fur and Chris Clements showed both his paintings and small assemblages together. In Serving Suggestions (until December 22) Megan Campbell paints on serving and muffin trays, Victor Berezovsky presents drawings on A4 lined paper, and Brian Staite prints onto paper ceramics. This is kitchen table art, reflecting nicely on the exhibition title (a la the 'Serving Suggestions' made on the packets of food products) in small works that reference the domestic in subject and their making.
 
There's a love of irreverence alongside poetic elegance. This show's mascots are Dallas White's delightful 'cigarette dogs', handsome dog statues made from the latticework of folded cigarette packets. Like other works in these two group shows the materials may be cheap and their subject everyday, but they hold that crucial conceptual charge that leaves you toying with them, yapping at your heels, after you leave the gallery.    
 
There's also a love of the tactile. The seductive object you long to touch or whose surface gives it a charge. Shepherd's paintings were the most obvious example, but I was also struck by how skilled painter Anna-Marie O'Brien is at working the surface of found wood. Her style might seem at first glance illustrative and her domestic subject matter, of home-hairdressing comb, brush and scissors, commonplace, but texture, brushstroke and her strengths as a colourist ensure the objects bristle with violent violet potential.
 
Curatorially, Serving Suggestions provides a series of nice strong exchanges between these artists. I don't have space to do the artists full justice here, but was likewise taken by Berezovsky's unnerving play with the metamorphosis of form in his fluid line-work, with his grotesque depiction of kitchen activity like the telling of a surreal medieval fable for the mind. Metamorphosis between animal and human form is also found with Bronwynne Cornish's Guardian figures and in Megan Campbell's astonishing suite of magic realist works.
 
Campbell provides, in oil on trays, an invented history of sweet nocturnal dreams (a bride-to-be dreaming of becoming a bird and flying away?). Referencing Victorian portrait photography and drawing and naïve surrealism, these are intoxicating Rousseau-like fictions in the colonial Wairarapa landscape.