The Trench
Gavin Hipkins
November 30 - December 13 1998
Gavin Hipkins is one of New Zealand's leading photographers, whose
explorations of the photographic medium employ numerous stylistic
and tactical approaches. At once fascinated by and suspicious of
'new modernism' in art, architecture and photography, Hipkin's project
seeks linkages between our concepts of old and new, or modern and
traditional, while constantly subjecting such terms to close scrutiny.
The Trench is his first solo exhibition in Christchurch,
and for this body of work Hipkins has drawn on his experiences of
Northern India, where he traveled in 1997 to photograph Chandigarh
(1955-65), a city conceived and designed by the arch modernist architect
Le Corbusier. Chandigarh is known also as "The Radiant City"
and contains examples of Le Corbusiers most celebrated buildings,
though for Hipkins it was the Monument of the Open Hand that
compelled him most. This lofty monument stands in the centre of
a sunken amphitheater, and represents an abstracted form that gradually
rotates on it's supportive pole, symbolically representing "the
direction of the wind (that is, the state of affairs)" (Le
Corbusier).
The slide projections that comprise one part of The Trench
show the Monument of The Open Hand from eighty different
angles as Hipkins has circled the sculpture. Each slide is a double
exposure, the open hand overlaid with a ghostly image of a rose
from Chandigarh's Rose Garden. The beam of light from the slide
projector echoes the important role that light played in the design
of The Radiant City, and in modernist architecture in general, emblematic
of state authority and universal law. In the gallery's lower exhibition
space commercially printed snapshots of exploding fireworks again
meditate on the monumental function of light in modernism. Displayed
in cheap plastic frames these unassuming photographs capture and
historicise a spectacular moment, flattening it's impulse in the
act of preservation. Similarly, while the judges and lawyers of
Chandigarh once identified with The Monument of The Open Hand
as a representation of universal law, when Hipkin's visited it
The Trench of Contemplation had been appropriated as a playground
for young cricket players. Today, all mixed up with popular culture,
The Open Hand has witnessed the dissolution of it's own authority.
Reviews, Essays & Articles
Tidy fireworks, pavement art
The Press, 1998 Dec. 9, p. 19
Ussher, Robyn.
The Trench, by Gavin Hipkins; Sidewalk Art project, Worcester Boulevard.
|