Every week, we send two writers to an art exhibit in Ōtepoti Dunedin. One of them will choose a specific piece, and describe it to the other without them looking. They’ll try to figure out what the piece actually is before diving into their thoughts on the entire exhibition. You can’t ascribe any one meaning to any one piece of art, so this functions a bit like a game of artistic telephone. Let’s dive in.
This Week: Oliver Perkins’ A Kind of Arrow: The Turducken of Paintings.
Esmond: This piece has got a feel of violence and sharpness to it, both in its colour and form. It really experiments with the boundaries of its own material and medium, and is quite conceptual. It’s a work that arouses emotions in the viewer, even if for some that might just mean confusion.
Maddie: Ok, this has got to be modern art, right? Probably a kind of sculpture? Perhaps using metal, like steel or iron?
The answer: We’re looking at Oliver Perkin’s piece, Untitled; it’s painting #3 in his A Kind of Arrow exhibition at DPAG. In this exhibition, the canvas becomes the medium, as does the gallery space itself, the coloured walls being works in the exhibition. Perkins takes a knife to what we think art is, or perhaps a crossbow. Let’s see if his arrow’s got a point.
Oliver Perkin’s A Kind of Arrow has been the hardest exhibition to review so far, consisting of abstract paintings and colourful interventions to the gallery space. But first let’s address the enormous, conceptual grey shape in the theoretical room: many people hate abstract art with an irrational passion. You may take one look at it and ask, “Why has this person just shoved canvases inside each other and called it art?”, and honestly, you’d be asking a bloody good question.
To appreciate this exhibition, understanding some of the canon of abstraction in western art is obviously useful — something that’s now even less common thanks to Otago University shutting down the art history department (RIP). DPAG wisely provides a mini crash course on abstract art, in the form of the exhibition in, on, over as a walkthrough prelude to Perkin’s exhibit. It contains several different works that take different approaches to abstraction. For residents of North D, this may well be unnecessary for enjoyment: Perkin’s canvases speak to the same impulse of conscious deconstruction as the frame of a former couch. Some of the violent, rust-red paint splatters will have you leaning in, like, is that blood?
What Perkins really urges us to consider is the materiality of painting. Canvases slide under the sliced slits of each other, like back in primary school, sticking safety pins through the top layer of skin on your fingers for fun. Cuts in the paintings expose the wood the canvas is stretched on, and even the watercolour paint often seems accidental, as though Perkins decided to put his workshop tablecloth on display at the last minute. This is painting that destroys itself to the point of sculpture. Like all abstract work, you have to meet it halfway. Some of the works aren’t much to look at at first, while some seem only like pretty colours. But by slicing, inserting out and in, and even breaking up the gallery space itself, Perkins is doing a dissection. You may be left asking: how are these even paintings? And that’s exactly the right question.
Something you may not immediately realise is a part of the exhibition are the interventions Perkin’s has made to the physical gallery itself. Walls have been painted to block primary or secondary colours, transforming the gallery itself into a giant Mondrian composition painting. Dividing walls are placed in a position that leaves a gap that is just not quite wide enough as you would expect, which leaves you constantly aware of how your body navigates through space. It's kinda like that awkward interaction when you’re walking down the street and trying to move out of the way of someone’s path. You go right. So do they. It’s an awkward impromptu dance.
Perkin’s exhibition asks us to challenge our own understanding of what makes a painting. And no, before you say it, your two-year-old could not have done this — two-year-olds should not be using knives.
Recommended song for your visit: Burning Down the House by Talking Heads
This column is sponsored by DPAG, but they have no influence on the reviews
Oliver Perkins
Motors 2021
Watercolour and size on canvas
Courtesy of the artist
Oliver Perkins
Mosaic 2021
Acrylic, ink, spray paint, size on canvas
Courtesy of the artist
Oliver Perkins
Blue cross 2022
Watercolour and size on canvas
Courtesy of the artist