| Above
Joanna Langford, installation concept
drawing, January 2009. © Joanna Langford
Joanna Langford was invited to create a new installation
for the 2009 Auckland Art Fair because of her
knack at creating sculptures with uplift: towering
plastic clouds, improbably delicate ladders to
nowhere, stilted houses, pink mountains, and candy
and cookie castles. Langford is an architect of
the imaginary, conjuring fantastical worlds and
sugar highs.
Joanna Langford’s Auckland Art Fair installation
project is the largest installation to-date for
the artist and brings her to the attention of
Auckland audiences, many of whom have not yet
seen a major work by her. The project, which is
curated by Rob Garrett (Curator of Special Projects),
creates a dramatic entrance experience for visitors
to the Art Fair, taking up more than half the
length of the massive entrance hall.
Seen up-close, Langford’s installations
seem wonderfully off-hand and down-to-earth. Whether
they are tiny mdf houses on slender stalks cobbled
together using a glue-gun (Lollipop in
Follow the White Rabbit, Artspace, Auckland,
2003) or towering plastic-bag clouds (Down
from the Nightlands, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui,
2007) they are light-weight, portable –
the work of an itinerant artist – and fabricated
in ways that suggest they could have been made
on the dining table by raiding the kitchen odds-and-ends
drawer.
Not only do they have an air of something you-could-do-too,
they seem clumsily or awkwardly put together as
if Langford hasn’t quite mastered the techniques
of cutting, trimming, gluing and plastic-welding.
They are naff; either delightfully or disturbingly,
depending on how attached you are to neat edges
and seamless connections.
Of course Langford is not unskilled or clumsy.
The apparent off-handedness of her technique is
a deliberate effect. The artist’s awkward
manners are perhaps both the avoidance of any
whiff of virtuosity (read pretension) and a strategy
to re-direct our attention to the imaginary worlds
she creates. Some will like the home-made qualities
they see in Langford’s work, some will be
unsettled by them, wondering how she gets away
with such cack-handedness. Either way, what lingers
most is the sense of magic and wonder of her Lilliputian
and floating worlds.
Since 2003, Wellington-based Joanna Langford
has exhibited her delicate imaginary clusters
of habitations, ladders and towers to nowhere,
and cloud-scapes in artist-run spaces, project
galleries, with her dealers in Christchurch, Wellington
and Auckland, and in a growing number of public
art galleries. She is receiving increasing critical
acclaim and has proved herself capable of undertaking
increasingly ambitious and imaginative projects.
The artist recently completed major installation
projects for the Christchurch Art Gallery (2006),
Wanganui’s Sarjeant Art Gallery (2007),
the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth
(2008), and the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery at
City Gallery, Wellington (2008).
For the Auckland Art Fair, Langford has conceived
her most ambitious and largest cloud installation
to date. The artist is keen to create “a
zone that is so physically different” from
where you have just been “that it feels
like anything could happen and it heightens your
imagination.” This is the power of the recent
cloud installations: they are so modest and everyday
and yet they create the kind of magical experience
that can catch you completely off guard.
Joanna Langford’s installation project
is supported by the Arts Board of Creative New
Zealand. |
