Call and Response Exhibition

A group exhibition featuring artists:

Frankie Rouse, Mica Still, Marci Tackett, Deidra Sullivan and Caroline McQuarrie.

“In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first. It corresponds to the call-and-response pattern in human communication and is found in many traditions.”

In this exhibition Call and Response, each artist engages with and responds to a prompt, or ‘call’ from the past. The ‘calls’ take their form as memories of absent friends; old family photographs; childhood landscapes; the loss of home, and the origins of physical identity. Each artist takes up what they have been taught, told, or found, and re-engages with the material to address their ongoing areas of enquiry. The work in the show is related through investigations of identity, history and memory.

Frankie Rouse

Frankie’s subject matter is her home, the suburb she lives in – Newlands – on the periphery of Wellington City. She has photographed what she describes as iconic images of Newlands; that is, a large water tank, pylons and rolling hills – seemingly banal scenes that she identifies with as home. The photographs are black and white, soft focus and exude nostalgia for the past. They are the product of an old camera that is unpredictable, does not pitch its focus and where the outcome is as much by chance as it is by design. This is part of the challenge for Frankie and integral to her working process.

The photographs, printed in square format, appear squeezed in their frame, allowing the viewer only a glimpse into the scene, as though looking through a port hole into another time and space. Frankie presents this suburban and industrial environment as an estranged, yet romantic landscape.

Mica Still

Mica’s practice over the past five years has explored themes of migration and the concept of “home”. This current body of work takes that theme into another dimension and examines family relationships – in particular the pattern of divorce in both her immediate and extended family.

Her work consists of two distinct, yet interrelated installations. One is made from nine plaster-cast domes that represent her nuclear family and their relationship to her, from her biological father to her adoptive father and her current stepfather, along with her brothers – half brothers and stepbrothers. Imagery on the plaster casts has been painted and varnished with symbol-like icons that represent Mica’s family members.

The second installation, I was bred for this, is a family tree that traces the pattern of divorce from her mother in the centre, grandmother on the fringe and herself at the bottom. Each person is a pencil circle; within the circle are numbers indicting how many times they have been married. From each number red cotton is strung illustrating a marriage and another addition to the extended family. This installation includes Mica’s Wedding Dress hanging over the piece of red cotton that extends from her circle on the wall to an abandoned rusty birdcage. Mica’s work is rich in symbolism and provides the viewer with a narrative about family links through marriage, birth and divorce.

Marci Tackett

“I love the notion that everything we are made up of comes from the expansion of the universe. As an artist, I aspire to be an inventor, an explorer in and of my life and environment.” (Marci Tackett)

In this series of work, Marci is working with the concept of injury and healing. What is the nature of a wound? How do we heal? What is the architecture/geometry of repaired skin? What are the colours of injury and healing?

The three large scale encaustic panels describe the way the body deals with trauma: response/reaction/regeneration. The paintings are a combination of beeswax, damar resin and pigment. The application of dozens of translucent layers combined with the process of fusing or melting each one into the lower layers allows Marci to deliberately bury or expose elements within each painting. This action-based metaphor is Marci’s way of expressing how she thinks about the way that the body responds to trauma. The layering of pigment and wax is at the same time hiding, preserving and exposing areas in the work in the same way that the body will hide, expose and preserve a wound.

Deidra Sullivan

This series of photographic images explore the relationship between ambiguity, imagination and memory within the context of the family album.

Deidra has used torn wedding photos to reconstruct her family history. While these stories and histories are specific to her family, the family album is a recognisable and accessible cultural practice. It is how many families construct narratives and preserve their culture and history.

Deidra reconfigures the wedding photos, juxtaposing portrait with backing mount and changing the position of the bride. Is Deidra questioning the authenticity of the event and satirising the sacredness of the family album? Or do the ripped and reconfigured pictures from this family album provide an alternative path to the past?

Caroline McQuarrie

Caroline’s work explores the act of making as a means of maintaining connections between people. She is particularly interested in detail, intimacy and the domesticity inherent in the arts or crafts associated with “women’s work”.

Caroline’s installation Woven Seam Binding Stay explores relationships between people, specifically between female friends or family members who have been absent from her life, either through distance or death. Caroline has considered the way we continue to maintain our side of the relationship with little or no input from the other party. She questions whether what remains with us in memory bears any resemblance to the actual person. Caroline has made each ‘absent’ person a garment, illustrating her side of the relationship, exploring the act of making as a means of maintaining connections between people over distance and time.

The second component of Caroline’s work examines family portrait photography. She has embroidered through and over these posed and highly constructed images as a way of re-interpreting family connections and analysing how we memorialise those relationships through the practice of portraiture.

Call and Response runs until Saturday 3 February. There will be a floor talk on Saturday 20 January at 2.00pm. If you would like more information about this exhibition please contact the Gallery Coordinator at Toi Pōneke, Wellington Arts Centre, tel: (04) 385 1929.

ENDS

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