Thresholding

24 July - 30 October 2022
Pātaka Art + Museum (free entry)
www.pataka.org.nz

This exhibition is mostly in darkness. The lights rise and fall slowly over the paintings.

The following is the wall text inside the exhibition:

A threshold can take many forms. A door, a ritual, a painting, grief, gender, time.

Here in our gallery, it takes the form of twilight.

This allows paintings to be felt, in the dusk and darkness, before and after they’re seen. How do paintings feel in the dark?

Here, threshold also takes the form of paint pulling, between thick and thin, loose and tight, abstract and real. Raw linen shows through in many of the paintings too, because “these paintings are not whole stories. If anything, they’re the holes in stories, showing themselves being made and undone.”

The tactile nature of the paintings has us walking in close, to experience the purely abstract, thick swathes of colour – then walking back to find the form and feeling. Even in doing this as viewers, we move through a threshold. This work attunes us to the transitional experiences in our world.

If thresholds are what we pass through to move from one place (or state) to another, then thresh-holding is an exploration of what happens when we don’t pass through – but rather, hold – in the shapeshifting space in-between.

“I think about painting as making second-skins for us to feel through. I’m pushing paint around until it hits a nerve, until it activates feeling. The work is in the feeling.”

The video below is an interview in the studio, about making this exhibition