‘‘The Accident of Ourselves’’, Michael Harrison (Brett McDowell)
‘‘The Accident of Ourselves’’ is Aucklandbased artist Michael Harrison’s sixth exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery. In the following quotation Harrison describes what drives his practice: ‘‘I try to look again at familiar things as though I’m looking for the first time [on a good day] or the last time [on a bad day] — or for the only time’’ (Artspace, Auckland, 2002).
It is this clarity that Harrison brings to his depictions of people, cats, dogs and the elements. Oddly, it is this clarity that enables Harrison to capture the familiar and the strange, as in the painting Her Reflected Light
(2018). With a pale yellow dog arching upwards in each bottom corner and a plump cumulus cloud of the same pale yellow in the top two corners of the painting this delicate acrylic is vertically symmetrical. The apparent subject of the two dogs and the two clouds seems to be a female face enclosed in a red circular moon suspended between the two sets of yellow. The night sky is a gentle grey.
In Follow the Sea (2018), a dolphin leaps out of the sea to look at a slim young man against a background of crushed poppies. Harrison’s acrylics resemble the lightness of watercolour. Whether as intentional counterpoint, Brett McDowell also presents a collection of elegant, geometrically inflected ceramic works by Isobel Thom.