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Miranda Parkes
Malcolm Terry
7 - 28 September 2007
Early and modernist abstraction continues to provide contemporary artists with a rich abundance of formal and ideological conundrums and jumping off points. References, which unsurprisingly, become substantially reworked and constructed anew when hitched to the agendas of the new kids on the block. Formal properties held dear by modernists such as line, colour and form’s pared-back purity (formal, ideological and moralistic), undergo a thorough and invigorating makeover, with spatial innovations emerging as one central concern in the work of both Miranda Parkes and Malcolm Terry.
Miranda Parkes’ works quite literally take up space. Like plucky ballooning duvets, collapsing marquees, partially deflated beach balls or errant icebergs they crumple and lurch with a semi controlled recklessness out from their stretchers. The canvas is shaped, scrunched and contorted so as to barely resemble its two dimensional origins, and the viewer is invited to walk around this object which is part sculpture, part painting and explore the niches and crevices. They draw you in, but with titles that have included ‘Stalker’ perhaps it they who are actually watching you.
Modernist painters such as Barnett Newman experimented with shaped canvases later in life that included canvases in the form of the letters L, N, M and T and polygon forms (Irregular Polygon series, 1960’s, and Eccentric Polygon series, 1970’s), but the shaped canvas is generally and primarily associated with colour field painter Frank Stella. More contemporary exponents and innovators in this field include Monica Prieto (whose paintings come out to meet the viewer) and Jessica Stockholder, whose installation works are conceptualised as paintings which have been blasted apart. Parkes, however, keeps one foot in each camp (painting and sculpture) so as to extend the dialogue in, and between each discipline. An idea she puts forward, that of surveillance, where the viewer is conceptualised as the object, offers a fresh interpretation and builds on the work of her artistic predecessors.
Parkes completed a MFA (University of Canterbury) in 2005, participated in Telecom Prospect 2007 (City Gallery, Wellington), and her work is held in private and public collections including the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu.
While the very three dimensionality of Parkes’ work negotiates spatiality, Malcolm Terry adheres to a standard canvas but reworks geometric line and form to attain a sense of depth and space. With the cuboid (three dimensional rectangle) as his central motif, or building block, he creates asymmetrical compositions that appear to mutate and meander into an as-yet-to-be configured or realised space; one that could be architectural, bio-tech, scientific, mathematical, cyber or ‘other’.
By paring back the shape of a rectangle to its structural skeleton Terry has equipped himself with a form that is endlessly mutable and can be reconfigured in a variety of combinations and compositional formats. It is a ‘packing crate’ that can be filled in, stripped back to its essence, rotated, merged or joined with another at any given axis or juncture. Like a type of geometric molecule these forms can clump together in discrete groupings or comprise one giant atom-like form. Addition and subtraction, accretion and erasure.
If relying upon commentary alone, one might be led to imagine crisp lines, smart angles executed with precision and a calculated determinism that coerce the eye into believing these cuboids and prisms do occupy a graphic three dimensionality, however Terry demurs, holds back slightly. Working with a primarily pastel palette of muted pinks and baby blues (against dark greys, white), Terry deploys a ‘scuffled’ painterly aesthetic where the overlapping and reworking of line and colour are at times visible, lending a humanising whimsy to what is generally a sterile geometric form. Where Cubists emphasised the flatness of the picture plane and geometric abstract artists rendered simple geometric forms in non-illusionistic space, Terry offers a type of geometric abstraction that is oddly ‘human’ and connective in its forays into an undefined spatiality.
Terry graduated with a MFA (University of Canterbury) in 2007, and has works in many private and public collections including the James Wallace Trust.
Miranda Parkes
For further images and information please click on the link to the artist page: Miranda Parkes
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Springer, 2007
370 x 370 x 195mm
acrylic on canvas
SOLD |
Blazer, 2007
1030 x 1040 x 260mm
acrylic on canvas
SOLD |
Dreamer, 2007
680 x 950 x 130mm
oil on canvas
SOLD |
Malcolm Terry
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Miami, 2007
910 x 910mm
oil, enamel, marker pen on canvas
$2,500 |
Number 8, 2007
1000 x 800mm
oil, enamel, marker pen on canvas
SOLD |
21 Jump Street, 2007
1110 x 1110mm
oil, enamel, marker pen on canvas
$2,800
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