Exhibition: All Things to All Men - Kushana Bush

The James Wallace Arts Trust
MEDIA RELEASE: Monday 16 April 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

All Things to All Men and TEN open at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre.

All Things to All Men, an exhibition of recent works by 2012 Frances Hodgkins Fellow Kushana Bush, and TEN, an exhibition of paintings by 2010 Elam Master of Fine Arts graduates, open in the ground floor galleries on Monday 23 April at 6pm.

All Things to All Men will be exhibited in the Main Galleries until 27 May 2012. Kushana Bush will be present at the opening and will give an Artist’s Talk on Tuesday 24 April from 1 to 2pm. TEN will be exhibited in the Long Gallery until 24 June 2012. Anita Levering, Jessica Pearless and Emma Topping will give an Artists’ Talk on Saturday 5 May from 1.30 to 2.30pm.

The series of delicate gouaches exhibited in All Things to All Men were all created last year, during Bush’s tenure as the 2011 Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago and is a Hocken Collections Touring exhibition.

Bush paints exclusively with gouache, a medium first used in the 13th century in illuminated manuscripts and Persian miniature art. It is a water-based paint, which has either an extremely high level of pigmentation or a chalk-like substance suspended in it; working with gouache requires a high degree of precision. Any mistake cannot be erased once the paint has dried but must be worked around.

The exhibition’s title comes from the following passage in the Bible and playfully proposes that Bush’s amusing and imaginative figure paintings might satisfy everybody’s needs: To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. (1 Corinthians 9:22). Often captured in deliberately awkward or sexually intimate poses, her ordinary folk reveal a wealth of human sensibilities and spiritualties. The everyday activities that Bush’s figures perform invariably take on a ritual-like aspect that suggests proximity between everyday life and the spiritual realm.

Bush’s ‘hybrid’ paintings reference a wide gamut of historical art forms from Japanese ukiyo-e, erotic shunga and Indo-Persian miniatures, to the Italian Renaissance and the 20th-century paintings of Stanley Spencer.

Inhabited by a multi-cultural cast of actors, Bush’s cosmopolitan images are rich mosaics of cultural difference that unsettle Eurocentric art histories. Her satirical and often disarmingly intimate gouaches bring together constituent elements from all over the world. Many of the gouaches portray domestic scenes, everyday household objects such as dustpans and vases or characters engaged in daily activities including bathing, gardening and worshiping.

In Dec 2011/Jan 2012 Bush made a pilgrimage to the Italian cities of Padua and Assisi to view early fourteenth-century frescoes by Giotto. Since studying Giotto’s biblical scenes in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, Bush’s art has taken a humanist turn. Increasingly her characters convey the intense emotional power and expressive gestures characteristic of the Florentine artist’s figure painting.

Bush is a first generation New Zealander with British-born parents and her work often explores notions of ‘home’ and belonging:

‘I grew up having to call a place I had never been ‘home’. Although to anybody outside the family I looked and sounded like a New Zealander I felt stuck between the place I knew and the place I had been described.’

The paintings in All Things to All Men communicate the importance of social inclusiveness, community and human companionship in a global society currently exemplified by political unrest, social inequality and economic migration.

A 32-page exhibition catalogue containing an essay about these works by the Hocken’s Curator of Pictorial Collections, Natalie Poland will be available in soft and hardcover from the Gallery Shop.

TEN is a group show of recent paintings by ten artists who completed their Master of Fine Art at Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland, in 2010. This very diverse group of ten artists are linked through their individual investigation into painting as a medium. TEN presents a range of conceptual projects and ideas in a medium more than 10,000 years old, yet still relevant to this century. The exhibition reflects on how painting continues to be a fertile ground for contemporary emerging artists.

The artists represented in the exhibition are Gerry Copas, Hayley Green, Matt Heays, Nicola Holden, Anita Levering, Jessica Pearless, Scott Satherley, Matthew Teirney, Emma Topping and Sarah Williams.

Exploring ideas and concepts through painting, the TEN artists nudge boundaries by obeying or disobeying the rules, mixing, revisiting and borrowing from last century’s practices. However none of them engage with purely figurative work or with representation in the traditional sense. Abstract painting seems the modus operandi of this group of ten, with styles varying from gestural and intuitive expression, to hard-edged word paintings and geometric abstraction. Some of the artists draw from architecture, others explore the materiality and physicality of paint and paintings, others create minimal gestural site-specific works within the exhibition space.

The Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Art Centre’s opening hours are Tuesday – Friday 10am till 3pm, Saturday - Sunday 10am till 5pm. Entry is by donation.

For more information please visit www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz

All Things to All Men will be exhibited in the Main Galleries until 27 May 2012. Kushana Bush will be present at the opening and will give an Artist’s Talk on Tuesday 24 April from 1 to 2pm. TEN will be exhibited in the Long Gallery until 24 June 2012. Anita Levering, Jessica Pearless and Emma Topping will give an Artists’ Talk on Saturday 5 May from 1.30 to 2.30pm.

Image Credits

• Image1

Click for larger version
Kushana Bush, The Mock Meeting, 2011, gouache and pencil on paper, 380 x 280mm. Collection of the artist, Dunedin.

• Image2

Click for larger version
Kushana Bush, The Throat of Summer (detail), 2011, gouache and pencil on paper, 760 x 1680mm. Private Collection, Auckland.

• Image3

anna.boyd@wallaceartstrust.org.nz
www.wallaceartstrust.org.nz
www.tsbbankwallaceartscentre.org.nz

ENDS

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