dark works, hung low - 2017

Dark Works Hung Low

dark works, hung low, 2017, Space Gallery, Whanganui

(Un)known Ten with Tim Larkin's, Love Seat 2

(Un)known Six with Tim Larkin's, Black Oak Lamp

(Un)known Ten with Tim Larkin's, Love Seat 2

(Un)known Five with Tim Larkin's, Black Oak Lamp

Text by Kalya Ward

‘The search for one’s history is the search for oneself’.

– Pierre Nora

Memory is as cagey as it is revelatory, and as inconsistent, opaque and subjective as any historical narrative. We are the sum total of our memories, and the places and objects we attach to them are proof of our very existence.

In dark works, hung low artists William Bennett and Tim Larkin consider the subjectivity of both history and memory, and the ellipses revealed through the re-interpretation of found photographic imagery from the 19th century. Through the mediums of painting and sculpture, each artist in turn responds to a collection of local photographic studio portraits in which there is a mixture of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ subjects.

Bennett’s spectral paintings of faceless and mysterious sitters speak to the ghosts of the past, hovering between absence and presence, and inflected with the subjectivity of both history and memory. Larkin’s sculptural furnishings similarly engage with themes of the gothic, and the gallows of the past, pushing the realms of form over function in considering the relationship between space and object around and outside a fixed, sculptural form.

Bennett would also like to recognise and acknowledge some individuals painted in this body of work and their iwi. These include Ngāti Ruaka of Whanganui River, Ngāti Mahanga of Waipa River and the followers of Pai Mārire.