Two shows in Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery ask us to consider relationships between things — between our built environment and lived experience, works of art and architecture, works and gallery. The two are: The buildings notice me, curated by Sophie Thorn, and Duncan Winder: architectural photographs, curated by Sebastian Clarke.

The Adam, if you don’t know, is a convoluted set of gallery spaces tumbling down an old stairway; the spaces making complex connections with one another and their university surroundings. The work in these two shows takes advantage of this multiplicity of orientation and spatial imbrication.

At the top, Roy Cowan’s vertical stoneware ‘Untitled architectural form’ (1975) faces the university courtyard, restating its origins as an artwork in conversation with an educational environment; it was housed in the Karori Teachers’ College.

A lantern-like work by John Harris and Steven Junil Park sends vertical striations of light around the upper gallery in resonance. Inside this lantern, there is a curved seat where you can sit and experience the gentle work of the slowly revolving light source, which subtly squeaks to you as a reward for your attention.

A collaborative ceramic by Doreen Blumhardt and students, ‘Uku-paka’, and a collaboration of reclaimed timbers — tōtara, rimu, matai and pine — in Brook Konia’s ‘Tūrangahakoa’ anchor the two ends of the upper gallery.

Megan Brady’s delicate fabric work ‘To learn, by leaning into the wind’ flows down the void, connecting upper and lower galleries. This breathes with the verticality of the space and wafts beside a row of vitrines on the level below, which encapsulate Winder’s architectural photographs.

Onwards, down, Mataaho Collective’s activist faux fur work ‘Te Whare Pora’ powerfully stakes out space in a secluded gallery to the left and, to the right and down the stair, the sound  instruments of Jim Murphy’s ‘Machine Song: Gestures’ make their delicate sound grains known to the stairwell and open void. You are conscious of multiple conversations in this arrangement, bouncing back and forth between matter and space, senses and ideas, pūrākau and modernist pākehā stories.

Winder’s architectural photographs are carefully arranged in the lower Chartwell Gallery, in a series of angled cases resembling drawing boards, presenting modernist interiors, street scenes, buildings under construction, and architectural models of now-famous buildings, such as the Beehive.

It is remarkable to see these beautiful records of Aotearoa modernism close up, and peer into their austere and calm worlds. There is an airless-ness to them; they are timeless architectural compositions rather than records of sensorial occupation. The complexities of this modernist émigré lens are covered in great detail in Sebastian Clarke’s thesis, which establishes Winder’s work as a significant part of Aotearoa’s architectural history.

I was conscious of a strange reciprocity between the artworks, which are active and sensorially rich, and the photographs, which are distanced and inactive. When looking myopically into the images, to find anything out of place (only some stray curls of an extension cord, impressively mannered), I found myself waiting for the periodic ‘dings’, or the gentle  rolling of steel balls from one end of a track to another, from the ‘Machine Song’ works, and was conscious of the responsiveness of Megan Brady’s fabric work close by. I wondered how both photographs and artworks might be drawings, noticing one another.

The photographs demand close attention, as do architectural drawings. People and their lives, breath, are largely erased from the architectural space in the photos, and they seem to prompt an imaginative occupation, as in a plan or section. They are pared back to become abstractions of an idealised past, or future, architecture.

I imagined a row of chairs in front of the drawing board-like vitrines to help read the architectures in question. The beautifully crafted erasures in the photographs connect with those in Brady’s ‘To learn by leaning into the wind’, which drops vertically through the void beside the photographs as a huge fabric section, drawn through removing threads from linen. Lines appear through ‘un-weaving, letting light in’,¹ drawing stepped geometries resonating with the harder, more fixed forms of the Adam stairwell. When these delicate erased geometries are closely scrutinised, they waft away from your breath.

The buildings notice me and Duncan Winder: architectural photographs curate multiple exchanges, between built space, artworks, gallery and lived, cultural experience. Each subtly notices the other.

Reference:

^{1 Megan Brady, gallery didactic panel.}