The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Auckland-based artist Peter Madden’s latest exhibition at Michael Lett Gallery was serialised in three parts, allowing separate elements of his work their own spotlight. The first instalment, titled Lord of the Flies, saw the artist cover the gallery’s street-front windows with gold leaf, turning the space into a private, precious jewel case. This seemed like a logical extension of the museum case whose interior Madden gilded in Escape from Orchid City (City Gallery, Wellington 2006), which also featured real stuffed huia birds, extinct since 1907. Extinction and death are old friends for Madden—scattered over the walls at Michael Lett were swarms of real gilded flies, some of which were painted with various national flags, and lording it over the floor was a human skull, also covered in fluttering, flaking gold, like crumbling parchment, autumnal leaves, or disintegrating skin. Called Dusk, this memento mori was just another in a long line of decorated skulls for Madden, nodding towards the calavera tradition of Mexico, or the macabre baroque bone chandeliers of the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.
The second instalment of the exhibition, leaving the trail of golden flies intact, saw the addition of sculptural and pictorial elements, small and large, called Past, Future and Present. For those unfamiliar with the Madden oeuvre, the basic conceit is that the artist cuts and reassembles two-dimensional imagery, primarily from the National Geographic magazine, but with back up from catalogues of roses, butterflies and birds. Frequently, Madden turns his 2-D booty into a 3-D world: paper sharks nestle in blackened twigs, snakes run up chair legs, orchids perch atop balsawood towers and butterflies flock the interior of a pair of