Conversations down Cuba St corridors
Arihia Latham spends some summer lunch hours going down hallways and up staircases to a few of Cuba St’s small galleries
Walking down the cool, narrow hallway to Bowen Galleries on Ghuznee St, to an exhibition of new work by established artists Terry Stringer and Richard McWhannell, I realised how awkward I still feel taking that first step into the hush of a gallery. A small part of me doesn’t feel like I belong. It can take courage to walk in, or upstairs to a small gallery not open to the street. For some it doesn’t feel like their space.
It makes me want to turn galleries inside out, like the childhood hand rhyme ‘‘Here is the church’’ where you finish with turning your interlaced fingers to the sky to show ‘‘Here are all the people.’’ Because, really, these galleries offer an escape room from the outside world for anyone.
Gallery owners love having people wander in, and are pleased to either chat about the work, or leave you to take it in. These are spaces made for us to share in the stories the artists are telling, or take part in a conversation they are having together. All we have to do is accept the invitation.
I first came across Richard McWhannell’s work when he painted pictures of the valley beside my home for many years in West Auckland, Pararaha. He captured perfectly the vastness, eeriness, and magic of a place. This exhibition is quite different, but no less magic. The subjects look like travelling circus performers in vast landscapes: on the ocean, in the desert or in snow. Richard leaves it up to us to decipher the stories.
What is most interesting here is the conversation happening between the paintings and Terry Stringer’s sculptures. The placement of the works in groupings beside each other is well-thought-out, as is the subject matter: from the gallery window display of a portrait painted by Richard with a sculpture of a face by Terry, to the more circus-inspired paintings and masks in the gallery inside.
Terry invited Richard to be part of his show and it’s a comfortable coupling. It’s like walking into a room to find one person picking up the story from the other over a whiskey at midnight.
Stringer’s trademark sculptures are at once surreal and relatable. Hands cup faces, or hold fruit. The work has a darkness to it, the eyes holding expressions as if they know more than they will tell. Stringer is adept at creating sculptures that morph as you walk around them suggesting many things in one piece.
It’s interesting walking into a room of artists’ work and sensing how they communicate with each other, or don’t. Sometimes it’s like they were made for each other; sometimes it’s like a strange bunch of people gathered for a community meeting.
Further up Cuba St, down an alleyway and up a set of stairs, Suite Gallery’s summer exhibition features Geoffrey Notman’s small boat paintings, Megan Archer’s collages of figures in yoga asanas and Simon Attwooll’s Parkin Prize finalist screenprint of a burnt house. This is certainly a curious conversation. Attwooll gathered charcoal from a burnt house up the road from him for his initial drawings of the house, and then used matchboxes collected through lockdown to layer over the image, to create a paper cage over the black and white print.
I’d have liked to have seen some of the other prints Attwooll creates alongside this darker piece as they have a lighter colour palette and speak like the other artists’ exhibited here more to a summer theme. Notman’s nautical paintings are skilfully painted if not emotive or suggesting much hidden meaning. Archer’s works are a tease of what I know she can produce. While the collage here of shell and lycraclad legs is a nod to the summer season, my favourite explorations of hers are less recognisable, moving more enigmatically beyond this initial collage stage.
Up the road at a public gallery devoted to Wellington artists, Toi Poneke in Abel Smith St, Marcus Jackson is showing as current sound artist-in-residence at the centre. Slime Inheritances features a story of childhood recorder lessons and how we fill spaces. This storytelling adds depth to an otherwise pared-back gallery experience. Sheets of plastic and tubes emit wind sounds, leaving a lot to the imagination. His writing ponders along the same line as my thoughts on our nervousness in filling spaces, and how we might transform things as we do.
‘‘We complex things,’’ he writes, ‘‘blindly spread to fill the spaces we are left in, filling these spaces with formless references, pulling away from our points of origin and connecting back in turn, under new guises, with new references.’’
So come. Be brave. Step into the corridor, climb the stairs, escape the return to the mundane by connecting back into the pulse of Cuba St.