spellbound
I think Terry Urbahn is pretending to be a hippy. Which is strange because he is definitely from the punk side of the tracks and all of his past work is informed by this. His best known work, The Karaokes, 1998, starred the artist performing a cover version of ‘Peaches’ by English punk band The Stranglers. His work personifies punk’s DIY amateurism, a position that provides an antidote to hippy utopianism.
Spellbound, Urbahn’s recent show at Enjoy Gallery, an artist run space in Wellington, flows on from this. The title couples art and performance with ritualistic spell casting, presenting both as strategies to deal with failure and fascination. But there is a paradox prowling around this exhibition as it slips from one allegiance to the other, in danger of tipping the whole show off its axis. On the one hand there is Urbahn, the traveller from down under who, no matter how well-worn the path, how many times the story has been told and retold (in a uniquely down under repetition compulsion), is still knocked sideways by the uncanny displacement of seeing in the flesh often sited but never seen places. That person is awestruck, impressed, humbled. On the other, there is the canny artist, one who makes things in response to life’s bringings, with tongue in cheek, hand over the mike, stumbling over his failures with flair. These two characters battle it out, and their struggle is played out in the tenuously matched mind-map of installations that make up Spellbound.
The first thing that strikes you upon entering Urbahn’s makeshift world is the noise—heavy metal chords clashing with sonorous spell incantations emerging from adjacent monitors. The