John Hurrell – 28 August, 2012

The title refers to a series of letters an Auckland woman, Alice May Williams, wrote in 1931 to two astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, offering advice about the exploration of space - offering to pass on information acquired from extraterrestrial voices and coded newspaper advertisements that would help in inter-planetary travel. Discussed in a very interesting essay by David Herkt, her letters provide a lead-in to the art mystical ambience of this very inventive stock exhibition, presented in a darkened cavelike ambience. Within Lett’s Great North Road bunker, the only lighting comes from tall lightboxes used as plinths, some artworks themselves, and the occasional open door.

In the first larger Lett gallery room, in the half light next to a double lamp work from The Estate of L. Budd, one can see Chris Lipomi’s Single Pyramid Painting with an image of nine horizontal strata in a large prism. It is an ad for a company that reproduces Thomas Kinkade paintings in carefully explained levels of ‘authenticity’ and has obvious mystical connotations. It is curious that for the online slideshow promoting the current activity of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars, slide number 132 shows a similar image, part of the occult pyramid on the US dollar note. They are using it to show the detail of the Curiosity telescope when aimed at something ten feet away.

In the two dark rooms, we see works by eighteen artists, many of them imaginatively paired (or ‘trioed’) up in sympathetic groups and placed on lightboxes and under Perspex cubes. There is a fairytale ambience to this magic cave, the only sound coming from the delicate tinkling soundtrack of Sriwhana Spong’s 2008 film Candlestick Park, or the intermittent braying and teethrattling vibrations of et al’s much admired, metronomelike ‘Portaloo’ sculpture, Rapture.

This richly theatrical show is a clever way of revitalising the public’s perception of works by works by Dan Arps, Michael Stevenson, Sriwhana Spong, Hany Armanious, Chris Lipomi, Jim Allen, Simon Denny, Michael Parekowhai, The Estate of L. Budd, et al., Imogen Taylor, Zac Langdon-Pole, Seraphine Pick, Jacqueline Fraser, Steve Carr, Shane Cotton, Campbell Patterson and Eve Armstrong. The new contexts and fresh juxtapositions rejuvenate the art.

The more sombre wall paintings by Lipomi and Taylor blend into the dark murk and are barely distinguishable, in contrast to the comparatively high key works by Allen, Pick and Cotton which don’t seem to fit in - they look out of place.

Highlights include Spong’s high contrast film of a garden with flowery fetish objects, with its split screen; et al’s installation of stacked painted metal trays positioned around a filmed lecture of The Middle Way, that uses overlaid transparencies from geography textbooks, mathematical instruments, and silhouetted pointers; Hany Armanious’ chromed ‘inflatable’ Bunny, that looks like a lost alien; and Steve Carr’s scattered heap of painted alloy casts of crumbly orange peelings and gnawed at apple cores.

There is a lot to explore here as you circumnavigate your way around the peculiar tall lightboxes with their upward casting light and mysteriously supported sculptures. Such Close Encounters of the Art Kind only partially resonate with what we read of Alice May Williams’ account of her experiences with a friendly Martian family - as described in Herkt’s essay - for we keep our feet firmly on the ground once we step out of the building…until the next opening.

John Hurrell

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