Select > Effect > Export
Patrick Lundberg’s most recent project at Te Tuhi took place alongside Select > Effect > Export—a group exhibition by the gallery’s newly appointed curator, Stephen Cleland. Featuring works by John Lyall, Simon Morris, Sarah Munro, Rose Nolan and DJ Simpson, the show looked to work which employed mathematical and mechanical methods of art production. Superficially the works shared an inorganic factory finish and, more subtly, a reliance on systems to predetermine or shape their formal outcomes. On closer inspection elements in the exhibition worked to confuse and complicate this mandate, creating welcome nuance within a theme that risked oversimplifying a wide spectrum of practice. Both Munro’s blood-red curved fibreglass ‘paintings’ and Morris’s Manganese Blue Line, 5 hours 57 minutes (the title refers to the time taken to hand-paint the undulating pattern) gestured toward the balance between the body and the machine-made, while Rose Nolan’s mural-size ‘DIFFICULT’ seemed to loudly, if ambiguously, provoke the old skirmish between abstraction and information.
Staged as a parallel project, Lundberg’s formally precise, reductive patterns carved directly into wall and ceiling inhabited the small gallery in the foyer and crept into the peripheries of both the physical and discursive space of the curated show. For an earlier work at Te Tuhi, Lundberg’s carved lines traced the boundaries of the wall, swerving for electrical sockets and other architectural idiosyncrasies, to create a frame-like border. In this project the sprays and grids of small circular holes shadowed the effect of track lighting on the white planes of the gallery interior, visible as one moved through the various spaces. Lundberg’s works are always modest, the patterns are characteristically simple abstract shapes and their colour is utterly contingent on the