The austerity of Dane Mitchell’s residency exhibition in the two entrance galleries to the Govett-Brewster is a perfect foil for the exuberance of the exhibition ‘Stealing the Senses’. Context is everything. The alignment of Mitchell’s project with the group show upstairs is a smart piece of programming. The two exhibitions ‘talk’ to each other. Mitchell’s Radiant Matter Part 1 uses the language of minimalism and the aesthetics of transparency. It tunes up the sensory receptors, challenging us to focus on phenomenology and practical experience.
An alternative approach to the gallery is through the café, and there, as if to reinforce this message of everyday phenomenal experience, curator and Director Rhana Devenport commissioned Sara Hughes to make a site specific project for the exhibition. This work, The Golden Grain (2011), maps the café space as a ‘social art installation’ invoking the language of relational aesthetics, which creates a pathway for interpreting the exhibition.
Hughes’s abstract colour fields cover the floor of the café—and the table tops. The plates used for serving are a pie graph showing historical levels of wheat production in Taranaki. The names of the global wheat buyers are messaged on the building above the café’s garden area, the windows and doors are slicked with colourful vinyl bar graphs and the café menu doubles as the catalogue for the project. The menu is a key or index to the statistical analysis that Hughes channels into her abstract paintings. Even the sun umbrellas for the outdoor tables are pie graphs.
Hughes’s work makes abstract painting a coded analytical practice, connecting with social, political and economic contexts. Her work is underpinned by statistics, the visual poetry and patterns of raw data. The