Desert Rose

Desert Rose is a solo exhibition by Tyne Gordon that has developed from research into disused municipal buildings. Through patterns, objects and narratives contained in sites like racecourses and hospitals, Gordon produces new surfaces that reveal the social values embedded in such places. Following architectural and material cues, Desert Rose alters the gallery as speculation on the psychic afterlife of civic infrastructure. 

Central to the exhibition is Untitled (panels), a unit constructed from nine panels of Gib board. With its familiarity as a building material only partially legible, it is an inverted encounter with the corridors typical of schools, wards or other state departments. The top layer of paper has been removed to refocus on the dry mineral quality of the gypsum that is used in the manufacturing process. 

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper, an account of the narrator’s period of summer bedrest in a mansion, the wallpaper decorating the bedroom becomes animated, seemingly moving and changing before her eyes. The narrator is convinced a horde of women are behind the wallpaper shaking it. This enters the writing as a textual pattern through the reiteration of these preoccupying thoughts throughout the story. Untitled (panels) is a record of Gordon’s repeated movement across the panels that likewise insists on meaning produced by obsession and return to the same surface in order to validate one’s perception of what exists there. Gilman’s character’s nervous depression and her dwelling on the corrupted wallpaper patterning establishes actual interior space as a symbolic extension of the interior self. 

The marks produced by Gordon’s scraping are a reminder of the ornate motifs of Victorian architecture that persisted even in civic buildings. Site visits by the artist to Ōtepoti and nearby townships established as colonial settlements during the Victorian era built up an index of floral, spatial and literary imagery also revealed in the suite of paintings in Desert Rose. These motifs are linked to a corresponding set of colonial values and taste underpinning definitions of health or correctness.

Desert Rose attends to the psychological and historical energy released once institutional sites disappear. The title makes reference to the gypsum deposits that form when water evaporates from shallow basins, leaving a flower-like crystal as a keeper of the accumulated mineral. Moving from enclosure to surface to exposure, the exhibition considers the conventions that continue to influence social orderliness through design.

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This exhibition will be accompanied by a new three-part sonic composition by Maxine Funke, At Hilltop House.

a. macrocarpa march
b. at hilltop house
c. bay window