Response by Andrew Robertson There are few things that I love more than descending enthused and willfully uninformed upon an exhibition that I know nothing about. It was in just such a state of mind that I found myself visiting the Quiet Dog Gallery, caffeinated and care-free, on an uncrowded lunch-break – however, my usual excitable curiosity was somewhat complicated this time when a friend reached out with the rather novel suggestion of writing a review of my experience afterwards. The following account is my rather unpracticed attempt at documenting my entirely subjective experience, with the hope perhaps that you, the unwitting reader may feel compelled to visit the Quiet Dog Gallery yourself for an experience uniquely and expressly your own. ‘Slap!’, I knew, was the exhibition’s title, and Ann Braunsteiner - Nelson’s resident creative dynamo - the artist. Of all else, I was willfully and premeditatedly ignorant, in order to preserve one of my favourite experiences; ‘The Cold Read’. This is a style of looking at art wherein I savour my unfolding reactions and interpretations of the chosen body of work, filtered solely though my own preconceptions, rather than pre-informed opinion. And so I invite you, the unknown reader to join me, reveling in my re-lived ignorance as I step once more through the thresh-hold... Slap! Colour! Movement! Texture! Eyes darting to and fro, each hanging rectangle exuding playful exuberance; a near-tangible tangle of line and text, luridly layered splatters of bold, hyper-active colour. This is … a lot of stimulation to take in all at once. “Slow down, Andy, focus on one thing at a time – and most, most definitely, that third coffee was one too many. And breathe...” Slap! This is no sedate collection of sleepy, sea-side vistas intended to lull the viewer into comfortable somnolence. No, these are far more akin to a synesthesiast’s ecstatic attack upon torpid ease and sleepy complacency. To call Braunsteiner’s works simply ‘paintings’ is to rob them of the sheer frenetic sense of movement; of dynamic, layered complexity barely held in check by the bounds of two-dimensional canvas. Rather than seascape, these feel like a tempestuous riot caught mid-surge - and whilst the target of this intensity may momentarily elude us, the object of ire escaping off-frame, uncaught, the mystery urges us to investigate, whilst the energy and the passion remain, calling us to as-yet-unnamed action. We’re mere seconds inside the gallery now, and this is already an unexpectedly intriguing experience, my attention jolted and seized at a distance, my feet pulled forward to explore further. So let us step closer and see if we can’t resolve some of this restless, barely-contained vigor... Slap! Directly opposite the front entrance, the words ‘For Sale’ are both the first thing to leap out at me from the canvas, as well as, appropriately, the title of the work. A cacophonous collage with long-time collaborator Lee Woodman, the whole piece heaves with a layered glut of symbol, text and decontextualized anatomy, slathered and scraped with hyperactive hues poised seemingly equidistantly between the processes of addition and removal. What we’re left with is not so much a sense of something finished, as a glimpse of primordial process, a window into a pocket dimension where all is, and can only ever be in flux. Separating signal from noise, searching for a coherent meaning and narrative, my mind simply slides off the sides of this dimensional window, like a spider finding no purchase in a wet bathtub. Far from finding this frustrating, this instead feels like the promise of future unfolding, of a richness of context and imagery to be absorbed and digested at leisure, rather than understood and moved on from like some schoolroom pop-quiz. My primary (and indeed, still enduring) sense of this is work pure Passion and Expression - whatever obscure subject or object moved the creators of this piece, move them it most certainly did. There’s a visceral sense of motion arrested mid-splatter, of a drive undiminished in the freezing of timeframes. Still reaching for a frame of reference for this piece, I’m minded of one of the founding fathers of Abstract Expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg (for what is this piece, if not fiercely and expressively abstract?) whose own assemblages of paint, collage and found material so upturned the staid traditions of the American yesteryear. Braunsteiner and Woodman’s collage feels like a 21st century channeling of Rauschenberg’s suggestive thrust, filtered and amplified through the intervening decades of discontent and hyper-capitalized urban decay. Fifty years after the original Abstract Expressionist made his mark, his works remain mostly opaque to my understanding, but not in their primal, insensate reaching – so too, I feel that these works will continue to give of themselves, revealing of and reveling in their layered, provocative complexities for years yet to come. Slap! Pulling out of these complexly abstracted realms, we find ourselves once again grounded in the comforting, industrial reality of the Quiet Dog gallery space. Upon the walls we find further arrangements and explorations, from the cascading colours of Lachen’s geometries, to Wat willst Du?’s swooping, spray-painted lines and cryptic exhortations in Braunsteiner’s native Austrian tongue (my ignorance a little less willfull this time). Ranging in scale, colour, balance and complexity, these further works feel united in the sense of looking through, and in doing so, catching a glimpse of some cosmic-grafitto frozen mid-convulsion. I feel an eerie sense of viewing two equally substantive realities co-existing in superposition, both within the other – inner space and outer space meeting, opposites without opposition. Slap! ...and breathe. I step outdoors, momentarily disoriented as I fumble for my phone to record my thoughts for future reference - ramblings that are still largely unintelligible one week later. Putting all of this into words may be a lot harder than I had originally expected. But please, don’t let my words convince you of the merits of this particular experience – as with most worthwhile things in this life, seeing really is believing. Image reference
L top - Wat willst Du? R top - Lachan In text - For Sale Ann CT Braunsteiner (@annctbraunsteiner) • Instagram photos and videos Ann Braunsteiner (quietdoggallery.co.nz)
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Photo used under Creative Commons from jordan parks