Join the Dots
Words by Peta Nichols (building) / Thomasin Sleigh (art)
Photography Patrick Reynolds
A new extension to Wellington’s City Gallery is celebrated with an opening exhibition of pop art superstar Yayoi Kusama.
Renovation projects often cause something akin to a game of tug of war. On one side of the rope is the team that believes that an architectural addition should appear to sit obediently alongside the existing building, and, on the other team, those who believe that additions should be distinct from the original. In the game concerning the new additions to Wellington’s City Gallery, those vying for renovations to be distinct from the original won, but did so in a respectful way. From the exterior of the gallery, sitting neatly in a concaved corner at the back of the original 1930s building, the new addition, designed by architect Stuart Gardyne of Architecture+, is very much distinct from the original architecture, but by no means does it feel out of place.
Wellington’s City Gallery, which was originally purpose-built as the central public library, is part of the collective of diverse architectural styles that form Wellington’s Civic Square. The original building, which was designed by renowned architecture practice Gummer and Ford in partnership with Messenger Taylor and Wolfe, exudes formality but is simplified with geometrical ornamentation. In the early ’90s, the creation of Civic Square included the construction of a new public library building and the commission for Gardyne to convert the old library into the City Gallery. At that stage, Gardyne explains, “significant design decisions were considered about how to create contemporary gallery spaces within an existing building… we wanted the new work to be obvious, but the old and the new were also to be working together in some way”.
Gardyne has continued the 1990s concept through to the 2009 additions. The insertion is a geometrical form clad in rusted grated steel. “There were several discussions and challenges made about our decision to use rusted steel,” says Gardyne, “although we believe it has a particularly seductive feel”. The use of steel was also advantageous due to the addition’s tight site, which then required a lightweight construction method; but the steel also portrays a strength that allows it to hold a conversation with the heaviness of the original building.
The interior renovation project is much more discreet. The large, bright foyer that extends out to form the Russell Hancock gallery at the back of the building has been created by the removal of the cinema, and appears as though it has been that way since the building’s conception.
Upstairs in the new addition are two galleries, the Roderick and Gillian Deane gallery – created for the display of contemporary Maori and Pacific art – and the Michael Hirschfield gallery – which exhibits local Wellington art. Again, the transition from old to new is not immediately obvious. Until your eyes are drawn upwards towards the galleries’ ceiling one will not notice the small but merit-worthy architectural moment that Gardyne has designed by elevating the centre of the roof and designing a glazed roof lantern, creating an inlet for natural light to fall on the spaces from above.
Back on the ground level in the new addition, the Denis and Verna Adam auditorium is the interior renovation’s biggest architectural gesture. Gardyne has used detailing as a nod to the original architecture. Rough band-sawn timber batons clad the auditorium where the marks made by the original timber formwork can still be seen. A long slot window along the side of the auditorium creates a view to the exterior of the original building, a reminder that this is an addition. The City Gallery’s renovation sits assertively as a distinct piece of architecture, a brave addition to arguably Wellington’s best architectural precinct, the Civic Square. u
Yayoi Kusama has a spectacular biography. A repressed childhood in Japan, escape to New York in the 1960s, infamy and recognition at the centre of the contemporary art world, return to Japan, 20 years spent making art from a psychiatric hospital, a resurgence of international interest in her work, and a triumphal return to the annals of Art History. Traditionally a tempestuous personal life has proven to fast-track an artist to popularity – Van Gogh and Pollock spring to mind here. Biography provides the viewer with easy tools with which to decode art and label otherwise abstract forms with biographical symbolism. The overtly public narratives of Kusama’s life are inextricable from her art and are difficult to escape in her blockbuster show, Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years, at the City Gallery Wellington. I found, however, that the strength of Kusama’s work lies outside of these pervasive, tired stories. It is easy to delight in Kusama’s extraordinary patterned environments and reflective surfaces. Her work unfolds most generously when you behave like a child amongst it, rather than a critical adult who reads wall texts and says serious things about psychological illness.
The two extravagant rooms at the core of the exhibition, Dots Obsession – Night (2009) and Dots Obsession – Day (2009), are both optic and experiential treats – even as they inevitably become shabbier as the show wears on. Kusama has said in an interview given in 1999, “Polka dots symbolise disease”. More interesting, and by far more pleasant, is not to imagine oneself moving through the artist’s diseased mind, but rather to enjoy the aesthetic weirdness of these vivid environments, and the heightened physical self-awareness generated by navigating these spaces.
Infinity Mirrored Room – Phalli’s Field, 1965 (1998) similarly makes a tactical assault on both the eye and the body and is the most charged space in this exhibition. When you are ushered into this chamber the mirrored walls replicate your image off into infinity and you experience the bemusing sensation of being able to view your body from innumerable and unexpected angles. As such, you are able to leave Kusama’s tortured life story at the door and simply play in this fantastical construction.
Even in her painting, a medium not often considered to have a direct physical effect on the viewer, your body is engaged by the work. Kusama made her name in the 1960s New York art scene with her Infinity paintings; large webbed canvases of acrylic which form troughs and hills depending on which vantage point you view them from. The contemporary examples of these works in Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years still carry the punch of their 1960s predecessors. Infinity-Nets [OQABT] (2007) not only demands that your eye rove across the work’s surface but also invites you to walk alongside it, as Kusama’s treatment of the paint dips and rises, changing from different perspectives and reaching out into your own inhabited space.
Exhibitions of this size invariably have detractions. Viewing Mirrored Years on a busy day necessitates a frustrating amount of queuing and being observed by gallery attendants. The show’s publicity line could accurately have been Yayoi Kusama: Look but Don’t Touch. This is definitely ‘art’ and not a playground; a distinction that seems slightly at odds with Kusama’s own hippie, anti-establishment persona. In Mirrored Years Kusama invites us to be similarly uninhibited – as far as we can within the practical confines of the gallery space – and take up her offer of play time. u
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