3x2
Joanne Moar & Jim Speers
Fiona Gunn & Frances Joseph
Phil Dadson & Mike Stevenson

3x2 was a series of three exhibitions, each featuring two artists, that ran at the Physics Room from February to June.

The artists were invited to present their work with the exhibition space's context in mind, including its past uses and its wider surroundings. One way of considering the work, then, is in relation to these things.

The two artists paired for the first of the three shows in 3x2 are at the beginning of their careers and both in their mid-twenties.

Jim Speers has spent many hours in hotel kitchens, cloakrooms and foyers, setting places and carrying bags. He completed a degree in sculpture at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1992. He is currently based in Wellington.

Jim Speers' sculpture at once represents the glamorous veneers that surface public buildings, and makes an expose of some of the grime, flimsiness and rough edges that get swept under the carpet. An industrial-sized chandelier, for example, sits like a giant kitset assembled and ready for mounting, a patchwork of woods and paints - plywood, Dijon, off-whites and pencil scoring - a patently hand-made version of a commercial fitting. Perhaps here you could make out decorative art, traditional design - a fleur de lis - decayed or evolved through mass reproduction.

As with Moar's work, there is a direct link to the experience of the tourists who visit us here and to whom the Arts Centre in general is now set up to cater. The atmosphere and architecture of hotels, restaurants, even tour buses and their coachwork, cigarette machines or wall panelling, are all brought into play alongside traditional visual and sculptural artistic concerns of object making and painting.

Reviews, Essays & Articles

Interpretations of art installations
The Press, 1997 Mar. 12, p. 16
Feeney, Warren.
3 x 2, installations by Jim Speers and Joanne Moar.