Act Natural

Curated by Yvonne Todd

Featuring: Marie Blampain, Geoffrey Heath, Gilbert Melrose, Christina Pataialii, Meg Porteous, Cass Power, John Tiger Shen, Yvonne Todd, Susan Wiggins

McLeavey Gallery

29 May – 19 June 2021

Reviewed by Ish Doney for PhotoForum, 15 June 2021

(Above, Cass Power, Self portrait series)

There’s a push and pull between intimacy and performance in portraiture. Artists have a knack for taking us into spaces we might not normally have access to: a stranger’s home, a hospital room, a nudist camp. There’s an invitation to see something that might otherwise be private. At the same time, this view is curated by photographer and subject. The photographer frames and selects their images to tell a particular story while the subject, no matter how relaxed, is changed by their knowledge of the camera upon them.

Act Natural, curated by Yvonne Todd, explores this tension through portraits by a number of artists, many of whom are her former students. This style of curation provides an opportunity to see lesser-known works, and creates new meanings through clever arrangements. The trade-off is a removal from the context of complete series, making it more difficult to decipher artists’ original intentions. In an age of image bombardment, we tend to consider ourselves highly visually literate, but artists use diverse vocabularies and tapping into that language is particularly hard when only a few images are presented. In Act Natural, this is exacerbated by a strategy that supplies names, dates, materials, and prices but nothing in the way of exhibition text. It’s difficult to determine whether this is Todd’s approach or the result of the dealer gallery context. Either way, learning more about a work requires engaging with the gallerist or researching beyond the gallery space.

Geoffrey Heath and John Tiger Shen open the exhibition. Heath has been working since the late 1990s while Shen is a recent Whitecliffe graduate. Both show us into the homes of strangers. Heath’s Colin (1999) meets the camera’s gaze with a distrustful expression, despite his relaxed posture and attire, while the anonymous sitter in Shen’s work gazes calming out of frame, set amongst the plethora of prints and colours that adorn the room. Taken from Shen’s 2020 series Untitled - Made in China, the work recognises a style of interior decorating that is common among Auckland’s Chinese community. Shen noticed a parallel between this arrangement of furnishings and that found in China where space is at a premium (1). Both artists encapsulate the idea of intimacy vs performance through a similar approach. The images depict people in their private, domestic spaces, yet the subjects have arranged their homes and themselves with the camera in mind.

Next we move to a more public sphere. Susan Wiggins’ Here I Am (2013), a metre-wide print of a white middle-aged naturist standing before some spindly trees, hangs next to Heath’s Autumn (2007), an almost equally large print of a sad clown in front of a row of pines. Pairing a naked woman, especially one who doesn’t meet society’s stringent beauty standards, next to a clown feels like a cheap shot. However, there is no making fun of Wiggins’ naturist. A naturist herself and uneasy with the polished bodies advertising has taught us to expect (2), Wiggins’ has captured such dignity in her subject’s stance and expression that the solemnity of the clown is amplified beyond the ridiculousness inherent to his costume. On this continuum from body stripped bare to full costume and make-up, Christina Pataialii’s wrestlers (2016-2021) seem something of a midpoint. Rendered in various states of undress and posed in the theatrics of their profession, Pataialii’s sophisticated brushwork makes these small-scale paintings feel photographic in nature, a marked change from the large abstract forms she is known for.

Moving back into private worlds, we turn to self-portraiture, further blurring the line between intimacy and performance. Here, the artist has absolute control over their depiction, but this doesn't mean that nothing is at stake. Meg Porteous repurposes images from her family archive and medical files, displaying vulnerable moments and confidential information. NZ Surfer, gash gore of the month (reject) is a closely cropped portrait of the artist, aged 13, following a surfing accident. Despite the time passed since Porteous’ brother took the photograph, the print is dated 2019, marking the year it became an artwork rather than a failed submission to a magazine. Maria Blampain takes a very different approach to the genre, using costume and symbolism in an attempt to present layers of identity. Acknowledging the changing, cumulative process of identity-making, Blampain paints and ornaments herself to illustrate different countries that have contributed to her construction of self. Overlay no.5 represents New Caledonia, her birth country, in yellow and blue for sun, sea, and sky (3). The photograph is polished, vibrant and intriguing, though the intended meaning is difficult to glean without the support of an exhibition text.

In the same room, a 2021 work by Yvonne Todd hangs next to a candid shot taken by her late cousin Gilbert Melrose. Thinking in terms of performance, this is a particularly disparate pairing. Melrose’s photograph, Joan (c.1965), has the feeling of a snapshot. There’s a specificity here, Joan is a particular Joan – Melrose’s sister – and the moment captured, as she climbs slippery steps surrounded by ferns, is one that was lived. Conversely, the individual positioned before Todd’s camera in Bracchia (2021) is not its subject so much as a model dressed and eye-shadowed to fit the part. Todd is a highly skilled and intelligent artist with an impressive oeuvre and is famous for using humour and the uncanny to create compelling portraits. Bracchia is not so much a portrait of an individual as it is a depiction of a character Todd has created.

The highlight of the show is recent Elam graduate Cass Power’s self-portraits. These are textural, tactile works that play with distance and closeness, presenting an incredibly intimate moment in a style that sits between seeing and feeling. Power’s photographs are scanned from deteriorated 6x7 film, creating an effect of frustrated vision. It’s like trying to see through heavy lace curtains. The images include almost-recognisable silhouettes, but the textures, and added reflections from McLeavey’s arched windows, make it impossible to relate to the photographs solely as visual artefacts. The self-portraits were taken two months after Power’s top surgery and are the first images of them seeing themself as they’d always envisioned (4) . This veiling of an intimate moment does something to bypass the performance of the camera. The moment is captured but it is tactile and hazy, retaining the artist’s privacy at the same time as it invites us into an intimate engagement.

Act Natural captures the contradiction inherent in its name, highlighting the interplay between intimacy and performance that so often comes with portrait art. It suggests that performance is not the absence of intimacy, so much as an acknowledgement of audience. Each of the works exhibited has its own context and backstory, but one must look outside the exhibition to find it. There is, however, much to be gained from Todd’s pairings. The final work is something of an easter egg. A photozine by a 16-year-old artist known only as Bryn, it was hidden under some newspaper when I entered the gallery. I encourage you to seek it out.

Ish Doney is an art writer, poet, and theorist living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Ish takes photographs, knits sweaters, and is currently working in digitisation at Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand.

Footnotes:
(1) Shen, J. T. (2020). DEMO Instagram takeover. https://www.instagram.com/p/CDLTFa1M8EL/

(2) Personal communication with the artist, June 2021

(3) Personal communication with the artist, June 2021

(4) Power, C. (2020) Who are the river phoenixes of the world? https://elamartists.ac.nz/projects/who-are-the-river-phoenixes-of-the-world.

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