Tomahawk Adam Douglass
Offsite location: 62a George St Dunedin (Down Bath Street, behind Bath St Nightclub)
Recognising the importance of site to this new painting and installation series, Douglass’s opening will be held at his studio in Bath Street, where the contrast between the rough backstreet car park and his clean blue interiors have a potency unachievable in the gallery environment. Place is important here. Be it the raw costal landscape of Tomahawk or the grimy inner-city artist’s studio, Douglass’s installation feeds off reactions to its surroundings. Painting is entwined with its location. As Walter Heke explains in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
Tomahawk is an installation that absorbs the artist’s studio; an obsolete urban apartment above a well-known local nightclub; far from the foreign and isolating environment of the pristine gallery. We can relate, participate and interact in a recognisable location; a location that oozes blueness, transcendental all consuming, painted blueness with physical holes, cloud type forms and tomahawks. We are drawn into contemplating impermanence, decay, and the fixation on city neatness in the naturally corroding and regenerative environment. Simultaneously we are presented with emptiness: a void within the painted representations of cloud forms disrupts conventions and assumptions which surround our understanding of 'place', leaving an uncomfortable contemplation of opposites.
Graduating from the Dunedin School of Art in 2001, Douglass has previously shown solo at Sanderson Contemporary Art in Auckland. This will be his first solo exhibition in Dunedin in three years.
