a library to scale
Opening this Friday at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster is a library to scale, a photographic installation by Ann Shelton exploring historical narrative in relation to place and our insatiable desire to catalogue our surrounds. Shelton's exhibition examines the scrapbook collection of Taranaki bibliophile Frederick B. Butler whose collection contains more than 3,500 wallpaper-covered novels, filled with decades of clippings from local newspapers. Shelton recreates Butler’s library using 26 life-sized colour photographs, creating an eerie simulation or virtual encounter with the unique collection and giving a sense of its size and scale. The exhibition also features photographs of handwritten pages from Butler’s personal diaries in which he recorded the details of daily life in a similarly fastidious fashion. Shelton learnt of the collection during her residency at the Govett-Brewster in 2004.In 2006 the work won Shelton the Trust Waikato Contemporary Art Award.Director Rhana Devenport says "a library to scale in itself represents a highly personal form of archive that references an important and personal chronicle of Taranaki’s past. In its production and presentation Shelton is employing the same degree of accuracy, rigour and care that Butler did in the creation of his scrapbooks.”
Image caption: Ann Shelton Frederick B. Butler Collection, Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, Scrapbooks from: Hotels 1956 September – November to Petrol 1944 November – 1946 May. 2006
a library to scale runs at Govett-Brewster until September 9
FROM SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRALIA!
SCHIMPFLUCH To Play at Happy
Hailing from Zurich, the city where almost a century ago one of the original 20th century avant-gardes (1916-19) incited audience riots with theirBruitist (noise) literary peformances, Schimpfluch-gruppe is a decade-oldcollective comprising Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock), Joke Lanz(Sudden Infant - absent), Dave Phillips, and Marc Zeier (g*park absent), whowork separately and together under the Schimpfluch banner to release audioworks, create exhibitions and perform. Revisiting key Dada strategies ofaggression, chance, spontaneity and concrete/raw form, Schimpfluch threadthe historic avant garde fascination with the limits of bodily experiencethrough the extremity of Viennese Actionism and the excesses ofperformance-based precursors to Industrial music, to arrive at theirparticular blend of noise assault, gestural precision, rhythmic destruction,dark humour and primal physicality.
Schimpfluch-gruppe play at Wellington's Happy (cnr Tory and Vivian St) this Friday,
28 July
