SEASONED KAURI

Ava Seymour at Peter McLeavey Gallery
147 Cuba Street, Wellington
17 March - 17 April 2010


Is Ava Seymour really a photographer? Or is she an artist who just uses the photographic medium to make the arty collages she is best known for? Twenty years ago many photographers actively resisted the description of "artist". Raised on the Documentary diet culled from its socialist recipe book, they wanted to avoid any association with the arty-farty. They were determinedly downstairs, doing the dishes and sorting the laundry, content to let the irresponsible superior classes cavort upstairs according to their whims.

It's only sixty years ago that a fine photographer such as Eric Lee-Johnson actively suppressed the fact of his practice, conscious that association with such a "craft" might dent his painterly credibility. And in the 1950s he was dead right. Over the past couple of decades, though, photography has gradually wormed its way into the art pantheon, and while at the level of production - amongst the young - the scenario is lively and full of fizz, at the level of exhibition, promotion and publication - the preserve of the middle-aged gate-keepers - there's still a reigning sense of incomprehension: of caution at best and continued exclusion at worst. Acknowledgement isn't the same as acceptance. Equal pay, Gay rights, Maori justice. The list goes on.

During this period, however, those considered conventionally as artists have caught the drift faster than the administrators and consumers, and have embraced the medium to varying degrees as a legitimate ingredient in the smorgasbord of their practice. Of course, some older photographers, raised in the ghetto of the 1970s and '80s, maintain a certain resentment that such artists have trespassed on their territory, in much the same way that '70s Feminists might disparage young women who today choose pink and wear high heels, as if having fought the battle were the only qualification to vote.

Needing to know who's a photographer or not has become less a matter of definition than an indicator of a rear-guard stance. It's like asking who qualifies as Maori. Coincidentally - for this is New Zealand - Seymour's partner happens to be the painter Peter Robinson, who in the early '90s provocatively based a whole series of works on stating the proportion of his "Maori blood": 3.125%. This statistic brazenly mocked those who confidently confused proportionality with identity. Robinson is Maori because he identifies as Maori. Seymour may be 3.125% a photographer according to purists but she likewise identifies as such. End of story.

Seymour, though, is as much a collagist as a photographer. (This immediately raises the question OK then, what is a photographer? Dunno is the short answer. All we know is that the Modernist idea of the "straight photographer" has gone the way of the rest of Modernism's purist paraphernalia.) She is largely known for her collaged images in their various series, all the way from the first major one in 1997 Health, Happiness and Housing, through the Seven Deadly Sins series of 2003 to her White House Years work shown at McLeavey's in 2007. It's an interesting trajectory from welfare through guilt to fashion - a simplistic arc, admittedly - but it brings us neatly to her latest series, which shows her as more immersed in local art history than indicated by the White House Years, which revealed a sly debt to Gordon Walters' small gouaches of the 1950s.

In my Art New Zealand piece about the 2007 McLeavey show - Ava's Amazing Adventure, no.122, pages 60-62 - reference was made to the seeming instance that "New Zealand has often been the site of interesting artistic re-working: McCahon's 1950s' Cubism being perhaps the most obvious case". Prescient or not, the fact is that Seymour recently held the McCahon House residency at French Bay in Titirangi, and this latest McLeavey show exhibits the results of her time there. The McCahons lived in Titirangi from 1953 until 1960, and the artist's major series from that period include Towards Auckland, French Bay, the Northland works, Elias and, of course, the Kauri series. The house was, and remains, surrounded by tall kauri, and the subject occupied McCahon for six years between 1953 and 1959.

In the Stedelijk Museum's Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith catalogue, curators Marja Bloem and Martin Browne write on page 180: The kauri forest represented a sacred place for the Maori. For McCahon it was a newly discovered - yet typically New Zealand - site. Some of McCahon's kauri, painted as a single image or in combination with several panels, are realistic - recognisable as trees. Others are stylised, or express McCahon's renewed interest in Cubism - particularly Analytical Cubism, wherein the represented object or scene, and its background, interlock in a web of vertical and horizontal lines, achieving coherence through the relationship of interrelated planes and the use of a limited palette. In this last respect, McCahon's interest in Braque - and particularly in Braque's use of a subdued palette - is visible in paintings from this time. In one of the finest works of the period, Kauri (December) 1953 (page 78), an ordered, albeit fragmented, structure is created. The different branches and their surroundings are rhythmically interwoven, while the 'wedge' forms allude to shifting penetration levels of light.

That "shifting penetration levels of light" applies spookily accurately to Seymour's new work, and in a special sense to the large, dark piece dominating the show Triptyque Lumiere. Each of the three panels, hung with frames touching, measures about 2.5M by 1.5M, filling the main wall of the larger gallery space from skirting to cornice. They're glazed so are virtual mirrors, trapping the viewer in a slightly unnerving bind (possibly irritating for some) of artistic enquiry and self-revelation simultaneously. In the course of the day, as the light in the gallery changed, different elements in this large work advanced and receded in an almost kinetic way, the imagery often echoing McCahon's trees, sometimes more like planets hovering in the void.

At this point, punch-drunk from Postmodern appropriation, the sceptic might well ask So what? How clever is it to copy someone else's work? Well, it's a case of the diving board's relation to the swimming pool: the point is the pool, the board is the way into it. The Virgin may have been compared to a jug of pure water but this may be the first time McCahon's been compared to a diving board. In her new work Seymour's creating a number of firsts too.

But, to backtrack a little. From the very start, in the 1830s, the relationship between the two visual mediums of painting and photography has always been an uneasy one. The former has tended to condescend to the latter as being merely mechanical and blandly realistic, while the latter, feigning the indifference of the new kid on the block, regarded painting as the plaything of the powerful, just simply old-fashioned and hopelessly mired in the symbolic. Even when the art establishment seriously started acknowledging photography three to four decades ago it was pretty much on their terms, the attitude being that photography be grateful for the notice given, the assumption being that art was in the role of benefactor, not photography. This situation has prevailed to the present.

Seymour's new work provides solid evidence that the traffic is being reversed. Among much beneficence, what her latest project suggests is a link between what McCahon and Walters were doing in the 1950s, McCahon's wonky Cubism meeting Walters' experiments with the positives and negatives of the stem and bulb motifs that later flowered into his famed Koru series. Walters was messing with traditional Maori kowhaiwhai patterns as early as 1956 - there are at least four small gouaches extant from that year bearing witness to this - but it wasn't until the end of the decade and into the '60s that he was exploring the full abstract potential of the stem and bulb motif, in works on paper such as Study for Waitara (1959), Papier Colle (1962) and Green and Pink (1967). Until now these experimental works have been seen solely as precursors of the later Koru series, but Seymour's new work reveals a direct stylistic, formal link with McCahon's earlier Kauri series. One pertinent spin-off here is that such a revelation is cause to re-examine radically claims that McCahon's "Nationalistic" endeavours were necessarily at odds with the Modernist abstraction of Walters.

McCahon's late works - almost invariably the austere "word" paintings - were conspicuous for their restricted palette of whites, greys and blacks, a far cry from the naturalistically earthy greens, browns and golds of his Kauri series. Seymour colouristically "updates" the Kauri works with his later palette half a century later, just as the painter himself had updated the forms of Cubism half a century after they took flight in Paris. By reprising those kauri through the lens of of McCahon's late work, Seymour is masterfully illuminating both, as well as creating works of her own that not only possess their own bewitching inner illumination but also make a perhaps unique photographic contribution to understanding the process of abstraction.

What does Ava Seymour's new work indicate? That corrupt old painting has seduced the innocence of photography? That the medium is being colonised by older visual traditions and arty preoccupations? Well, such a case could be made. But, another case can be made: that only photography, with its freedom to range further, could have made a revelatory connection between European Modernism and early attempts here to forge a new alloy out of that Modernism and indigenous patterns. Seymour's achievement is that the work no longer focuses on what photography - or any medium - can do, but on what the skeins of our culture consist of.