Fantastical worlds and sugar highs at Art Fair

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Fantastical worlds and sugar highs at Auckland Art Fair 09

Towering plastic clouds and improbably delicate ladders to nowhere feature in artist Joanna Langford’s specially commissioned installation project for Auckland Art Fair 09.

Known as an architect of imaginary fantasy worlds, Joanna is creating her largest installation to date in the two-storied entrance to the Art Fair at Viaduct Harbour, Auckland. The project, curated by Rob Garrett, will be unveiled at the Fair’s opening, the Hesketh Henry Vernissage, on Thursday 30 April and will be on display during the three-day event from 1-3 May.

Seen up-close, Joanna’s installations seem off-hand and down-to-earth. Whether they are tiny mdf houses on slender stalks cobbled together using a glue-gun (Lollipop in Follow the White Rabbit, Artspace, Auckland, 2003) or towering plastic-bag clouds (Down from the Nightlands, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, 2007) they are light-weight, portable – the work of an itinerant artist – and fabricated in ways that suggest they could have been made on the dining table by raiding the kitchen odds-and-ends drawer.

Not only do they have an air of something you-could-do-too, but they seem clumsily or awkwardly put together as if the artist hasn’t quite mastered the techniques of cutting, trimming, gluing and plastic-welding.

But the apparent off-handedness of Joanna’s technique is a deliberate effect – her awkward manners are perhaps both the avoidance of any whiff of virtuosity and a strategy to re-direct our attention to the imaginary worlds she creates. Some will like the home-made qualities they see in Langford’s work, some will be unsettled by them, wondering how she gets away with such cack-handedness. Either way, what lingers most is the sense of magic and wonder of her Lilliputian and floating worlds.

Since 2003, Wellington-based Joanna Langford has exhibited her delicate imaginary clusters of habitations, ladders and towers to nowhere, and cloud-scapes in artist-run spaces, project galleries, with her dealers in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland, and in a growing number of public art galleries. She is receiving increasing critical acclaim and has proved herself capable of undertaking increasingly ambitious and imaginative projects.

She recently completed major installation projects for the Christchurch Art Gallery (2006), Wanganui’s Sarjeant Art Gallery (2007), the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth (2008), and the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery at City Gallery, Wellington (2008).

For the Auckland Art Fair, Joanna is creating “a zone that is so physically different from where you have just been that it feels like anything could happen and it heightens your imagination”.

Joanna Langford’s installation project is supported by the Arts Board of Creative New Zealand and will be on display at Auckland Art Fair 09 from 1-3 May at the Marine Events Centre, Viaduct Harbour.

Tickets for Auckland Art Fair 09 are available from iticket 0508 iTICKET (484 253) or www.iticket.co.nz and are priced from $20. For more information on the event visit www.aucklandartfair.co.nz

The Auckland Art Fair is presented by the NZ Contemporary Art Trust with the assistance of its Principal Sponsor, Hesketh Henry; Major Partners ANZ Private Bank and Staples Rodway; Founding Partners Auckland City Council, Heart of the City and Tourism Auckland; and with hospitality support from Mirvac Hotels and Kim Crawford Wines.

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