Paintings
Curated by Sam Rountree-Williams, Richard Bryant and Patrick Lundberg >

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This month onsite, Window co-curator Sam Rountree Williams teams up with Auckland-based artists Richard Bryant and Patrick Lundberg to present a collection of works by fellow local painters. At the heart of the project is a desire to negotiate the various spatial/temporal alignments of the different works, and the peculiarities of the exhibition space. It is, after all, a quirky environment for pictures to inhabit: the viewing practices Window generally invites are far from disinterested, most often being embedded within other activities (while one is going somewhere or doing something else).

So, in a move against an attitude of ambivalent (or asserted) autonomy in regard to the environment, the three curators openly court the problems attached to Window’s relief-like depth and the foyer’s role as a thoroughfare. Like a commercial window display, Window must grab but also hold attention, and the pictures in the exhibition are arranged in a way that signals a clear recognition of time’s centrality to all pictures’ functions.

As in a traditional salon, the space is transfigured not solely through its being punctured by the different pictures depths, but also in the way that the eye is drawn into and across alien temporalities. This phenomenon operates according to the various ways the pictures hold time – are surfaces of compressed time, relate to different times, and display different life spans. Time is layered in the exhibition, and in parts is stretched out infinitely as pictures refuse to allow us full access to their constitutions.

James Cousins appears courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery, and Kirstin Carlin appears courtesy of Anna Miles Gallery.