Where ink meets canvas
At Absolution you can get a new tattoo or a piercing or simply discover art in a unique gallery space.
standing issues around tattoo in the serious art world remain, often perceived to be skilful craft, devoid of the complexity of ideas usually evident in gallery works of art.
However, Tamryn Howard, curator of Absolution’s programme, indicates that there are distinct differences in how tattoo operates today. The recycling of images in tattoo that are admired for their skill is now complemented by artists, responding to the ideas of their clients, creating unique works that move beyond the formulaic.
Equally important is the presence of a generation of tattoo artists who bring a knowledge of fine art and design to tattoo that was previously absent. Absolution staff member Julia Croucher is a graduate from the University of Canterbury School Of Fine Arts, who works as a tattoo artist, performance artist and also exhibits prints, drawings and paintings in traditional gallery spaces.
Exploring the body as a performance site in Artspace in Auckland, her ability to develop her work in a range of sites and differing materials and contexts allows her to extend opportunities for her practice in ways that most artists would never have considered a decade ago.
Such changes have been beneficial for developing new audiences for the arts. Howard observes that many regular visitors to Absolution do not visit art galleries. Absolution introduces visitors to contemporary art that they may be unfamiliar with but are increasingly curious about.
Its exhibitions focus on the work of artists that often reflects a left-of-mainstream aesthetic.
In the current exhibition by Jay Hutchison, My Little Pony and Friends brings together images of childhood toys, Marvel comic book heroes and pornography. Representing a ‘‘coming of age’’ by a male youth, fantasy and the fulfilment of desire are rendered with a matter-offact intimacy – highlighting the nature of consumerism in the 21st century through the confessional visual diary of an anxious teenager.
Opening in April is Original Skin, a series of canvas paintings by housepainter and artist, Billy Wilson, in which work will be installed to look like scrunched up paper sited throughout the gallery’s spaces – an exhibition that touches upon the challenges painting faces when it explores territory outside the traditional format of the four corners of a framed canvas.
Original Skin brings the promise of an attitude that complements Hutchinson’s obsessive stitching of canvas with cotton thread to create an innocent large-scale image like My Little Pony.
In the gallery space of Absolution it cannot help but take on the semblance of something more subversive.