The Power (or Otherwise) of Public Art

"Flour Power" Regan Gentry. Christchurch. Oct 2008. Ajr

After several visits, day and night and much thinking, I have decided I’m a little disappointed in our latest public sculpture – “Flour Power” by Wellington artist, Regan Gentry. The 13-metre high work references Canterbury wheat fields and obviously plays with Christchurch’s reputation as the flower/garden city. Gentry himself says: “To the imaginative, ‘Flour Power’ will give the appearance that a giant has walked through the city gathering lamp-posts like flowers, collecting them into a bunch, wrapping a tyre around them and placing the whole lot as a centrepiece in Stewart Plaza.” I’ve tried to like it, truly I have but I can’t help thinking there’s something cheap-looking about it and that the concept is a little trite. The aluminium – I presume it’s aluminium - and the glaring white cluster of bulbs at the top jar my visual nerves. Compared to the sleek steel construction of Graham Bennett’s “Reasons For Voyaging” outside the Christchurch Art Gallery, it comes a poor second in my view. Couldn’t there have been a more imaginative solution to the lighting? A mixture of softer, even changing tones perhaps? Maybe I’m making a hasty judgement. Maybe it will improve with age? But for $250,000 surely the Public Art Advisory Group could have given us something more thought-provoking and attractive.

Flour Power

The installation of our newest public sculpture

"Flour Power" by Wellington's Regan Gentry

is underway in central city.

More about it when it's completed

Give Me SPACE!

Top: Elmgreen & Dragset, “Short Cut” Fondazione Trussardi, Milan, 2003. Photo: courtesy of the Artists. Bottom: Carmela Gross, “Aurora” (installation view at the Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art), Russia 2007. Photo: Carmela Gross The days are getting longer, the spring bulbs are flowering and that can mean only one thing – we’re closer still to the launch date of ‘Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space,” which opens in Christchurch on September 19. The SCAPE Christchurch Biennial of Art is New Zealand’s only international biennial dedicated to public art – and, as someone who has now photographed almost every piece of public art in the city, I’m looking forward to some new subject matter. And I’m thrilled to hear today that things are kicking off with the unveiling of Regan Gentry’s commission for a permanent sculpture for that ‘lost wilderness’ on the corner of Colombo and Hereford Streets that is now called Stewart Plaza. I featured one of Gentry’s works (now showing at Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery) here last week – put ‘Art & The Bridge to Nowhere’ into the above left search box to see it – and I’m looking forward to something dynamic and illuminated. In the meantime, here are works by two of the fifteen artists from 25 countries who will be participating in SCAPE 2008 - “Aurora” by leading Brazilian artist, Carmela Gross, whose text-based fluorescent signs will be sited in a high profile pedestrian traffic precinct in the middle of the city; and “Short Cut” by Berlin-based Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who have been collaborating since 1995. In 2005 they created a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texas desert. Roll on September 19 – let’s get the arts party started!

Going Nowhere - Again

"Landschaft - The Bridge to Nowhere, Whanganui" by Ann Shelton. Photo courtesy Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui Further to yesterday's post about the Bridge to Nowhere and Wellington sculptor, Regan Gentry’s fabulous work based on the bridge (see below), I am delighted to present another artist’s impression of the same bridge. This stunning photographic work is by Wellington-based artist/photographer, Ann Shelton. Ann has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and internationally and I hope you’ll all now tune into her website – http://www.annshelton.com/ – to see more of her exciting work.

Art & The Bridge to Nowhere

"The End of the Tether," Regan Gentry. Image: Sarjeant Gallery

I loved living in Wanganui in the late eighties but I’ve always regretted not visiting the now-famous Bridge to Nowhere that was built across the Mangapurua Gorge in 1936. I was always intrigued by the notion of new settlers - discharged servicemen from World War I- arriving in this wild, enormous landscape miles from anywhere, trying to make sense of their new lives as (modern) pioneer farmers. It didn’t work. The settlement was abandoned in 1942 and the new bridge, part of a planned road designed to link Stratford to Raetihi, became a fascinating relic. To cut a long story short (which is totally against my nature I might add), that same bridge has inspired Wellington-based sculptor, Regan Gentry in the creation of his exhibition “Near Nowhere, Near Impossible,” which is showing at the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui until August 31. The show concludes Gentry’s six-month artist residency at the very cute Tylee Cottage. I love this work (above), “The End of the Tether,” an ambitious replica of the Bridge to Nowhere made from manila rope. It’s installed across the two front bays of the gallery’s west wing and viewers have to walk under “the thicket of hairy macramé” to enter the space. www.sarjeant.org.nz