FOR THE LOVE OF THE LAND
At a time when our relationship with nature has become increasingly fraught, and cultural perspectives on land passionately discussed and contested, Muse presents an exhibition of three artists for whom relationship to landscape is central to their practices. The history of New Zealand art has always been deeply preoccupied with depictions of the land. Whether celebrated as a blank canvas for ‘progress’ or romanticized as sublime and wild, Aotearoa’s singular landscape has taken root in our art to become a site for personal and collective identification.
Jennie De Groot’s often epic works are not so much paintings of landscapes, as they are landscapes constructed from paint - a subtle but important difference. De Groot’s degree in archeology seems to have registered itself in the innumerable strata of palette knifed-on paint layers that structure her work. Her approach to composition works at the level of enquiry to question both the physical immediacy of the painted surface and the illusion of pictorial depth. Added to this, any resemblance you might find between these landscapes and places you’ve been to are purely coincidental. These pictures are inventions that explore notions of place, non-place and memory.
Also concerned with memory, albeit collective, Josh Lancaster’s paintings explore the concept of the ‘desire line’, that route or track into the landscape that will lead individuals and communities to those places that will often become a shared site of significance, like a beacon. Even though Lancaster’s landscapes are empty, he points out that they are always all about people, their journeys, their stories. The paintings that Josh has collected for this show all explore quiet and quite ordinary places around his adopted home of Havelock North that nevertheless hold personal significance to him and his family; it’s become a project to find the beauty in the familiar.
In Andrew Barns-Grahams’s new paintings for this show, the mysterious women that usually populate his works have been replaced by vaguely disquieting and sterile-looking architecture. These unhomely quasi-Modernist buildings are nestled in oddly decorative imagined landscapes where background and foreground become weirdly mixed and tears in the fabric of one strangely patterned forest will unexpectedly disclose another one. For Barns-Graham, the narrative concerns of these dreamscapes are always future-facing and speculative. His dual (or dueling) realities contain fictional flora alongside more familiar species in a sci-fi infused vision that carries messages from otherworldly places.