Para
Richard Wearn
23 September - 18 October 2003
New Zealand artist Richard Wearn has been based in the United
States since graduating from Elam School of Fine Art in 1993. After
completing Master studies at the University of Southern California,
Wearn has exhibited prolifically in the States, but his work has
not often been seen in New Zealand. Having recently completed an
artist residency at the Headlands Centre for the Arts in San Francisco,
Wearn is in Christchurch temporarily to exhibit and visit family,
before returning to the States to take up tenure as Assistant Professor
of Foundations at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
In Para, Wearn presents several
inflatable PVC modular pieces. Three-dimensional works referencing
both painting and sculpture, these pieces adopt the idiom of minimalism
propogated by Donald Judd and others in the 1960s. Wearn takes
the modernist myth of the artwork as "a problem resolved" and
plays with it, by pushing the viewer to see his art objects in
relation to other everyday objects. The manufactured plastic objects
are easily transportable and re-programmable and reflect Wearn’s
suggestion of the ‘potential for the art object to re-programme
our thinking and action by inviting the viewers’ associative
memories to inform response.’ The external becomes equivalent
to the internal in these inflatable works, unsettling any attempt
at defining or containing the art object.
Reviews, Essays & Articles
Up the Arts
Canta, # 23, p.24, 2003
Roger Schulbeuys
Reviews Para & Twilight
Shadows
The Press, C2 Arts, October 15, 2003
Margaret Duncan
Reviews Para & Twilight
Para
Essay by Andrew Paul Wood
in The Physics Room Annual 2003
ISBN: 0-9582359-7-X
|