Andrew McLeod and Brendan Wilkinson
Andrew McLeod and Brendan Wilkinson 's recent collaborative exhibition, Cleaning Up, was dominated by McLeod's blue dot paintings which play on the similarity between the packaging design of Purex Economy toilet paper and the abstract art of Gordon Waiters. In many ways McLeod's Economy, 1999-a faintly streamlined reproduction of the Purex Economy pack on canvas- feels like the title work of the exhibition. McLeod's painstaking rendering of the Purex pack reveals the inadvertent pathos within it. Inscribed on an awkwardly rigid floating scroll, the word 'Economy' is presented in the guise of a motto one might live by. This is readymade satire-a monument to the local elevation of economic values above all else, emblazoned on the side of a toilet paper pack.
Interestingly, McLeod's dizzying regurgitation of the Purex dots, on supports such as crookedly constructed canvasses and a muffin tray, do not add to the cultural appropriation debates that have waged over Waiters's use of the koru. Instead, this is a chronicle of the economic environment that has redefined those debates. The cunning collision of Maori-derived abstraction and the 'Economy' brand makes the Purex pack a perfect emblem of the unlikely marriage of New Right economics and bicultural politics in New Zealand. However McLeod handles the association lightly. His less than pristine dot paintings are embellished with occasional seagulls that resemble the insects crawling over the surface of Richard Killeen 's 1970s' abstractions or the flying buttocks in place of putti that hover around Chris Ofili 's recently notorious image of the Virgin Mary. McLeod's loosely scrawled seagulls suggest scavengers at the local cultural dumping ground.
McLeod and Wilkinson share a fascination with the entanglement of economic and cultural