Coming Together
Since 2012, The Dowse Art Museum has hosted a biennial exhibition celebrating the work of local artists and offering the opportunity to create new work for a focused location. Despite its somewhat misleading Solo title, it is the diversity of practice in these small group shows that is key to their liveliness. This year’s chosen six―Deanna Dowling, Sonya Lacey, Dave Marshall, Annie McKenzie, Matthew McIntyre Wilson (Nga Mahanga, Titahi) and Andrew Beck―exemplify the broad church of the contemporary art world.
Deanna Dowling engages with ‘the socio-political, economic and geological histories of the land’ and how humans change it.1 Her installation Young Wood is Restless (2018) is rooted in her fascination with the built environment of Japan. During study trips there, she has meditated on materials, construction, and cycles of use, disuse and re-use. It combines a ten-minute video with a three-dimensional element: a cedar panel salvaged from a Tokyo demolition site and used here―not entirely successfully―to partially define the space.
The film itself shows a series of Japanese sites: the surroundings of the Shinto shrine at Ise, which has been demolished and rebuilt every 20 years for centuries; the Shin Kiba timber yard on Tokyo Bay; the original, now abandoned, concrete Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo; and the Pond of Dreams from the old site in Osaka. Apart from the millennium-old but complex were icons of the architectural ethos Metabolism, developed under the aegis of architect Kenzo Tange and others. It offered organic metaphors to deal with massively expanding populations, using short-lived, prefabricated and easily replaceable ‘cells’ to provide maximum flexibility. Wellington architects Roger Walker and Ian Athfield, Dowling notes, were influenced by this organic, evolutionary approach.
