‘‘Rods and Poles’’, Jessica Crothall (Moray Gallery)
‘‘Rods and Poles’’, Jessica Crothall’s current exhibition at Moray Gallery, continues the artist’s affective and formalist engagement with the 2010–2011 earthquakes in Otautahi Christchurch. The affect or emotion is most tangibly evident in the exhibition’s single figurative painting, Deposition I, in which a partially clothed man has been passed down a chain of rescuers to safety.
Deposition II serves as a transitional work between the figuration of Deposition I and the geometric abstraction of the other works. In this transitional work (Deposition II), Crothall retains compositional elements of the preceding work, but the primarily human forms become abstracted shapes in the exhibition’s colour palette of red, purple, blue, and yellow.
The ‘‘descent’’ trope — of the man and the movement from figuration to abstraction — complements the destruction of humanbuilt environments wrought by the earthquakes. That is, buildings that once were places of work (particularly in the CBD) became fractured and fragmented and inhospitable to human activity. Crothall’s sequencing of paintings and the formalist mode of abstraction captures the exposed rebar, beams, and poles that once formed and supported walls, floors, and ceilings. As part of the restoration process of the CBD, the built landscape became populated by scaffolding and Crothall’s attention to this is evident by the painting titled Scaffolding and by the short, overlapping lines resembling the interlocking metal bars. If viewed according to their sequencing, another movement is observable, namely Crothall’s application of paint, which is lighter and more porous in the later works.