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12th December, 2003 - 1 st February, 2004.

Lopdell House Gallery

Inn-House

On the Fringe of Heaven

Lopdell House Gallery occupies a space with in the historic building Lopdell ouse located at the centre of scenic Titirangi. Designed by Shortland S ree architects Bloomfield and Partners, the Spanish ission-style building began life in 1930 as the Hotel Titirangi. Dubbed by its board of Directors the 'Castle on the Fringe of Heaven,' the Hotel was intended to accommoda e he gro •1ing visitor numbers to the region. Titirangi has a long association with cultural tourism. In 1902 visitors at he Gen ral Hotel in Auckland were offered day trips by horse and cart up the Scenic Drive to view the large kauris. In 1927 Mr. F.O. Pea built a museum in the classic style, called the Treasure House hat is still in existence behind Lopdell House. This useum housed an outstanding collection of Kauri Gum, moun ed specimens of native birds, seashells and historic artifacts.

The fact ha he Hotel Titirangi was never granted liquor license heralded a string of financial woes and the Castle on the Fringe of Heaven eventually earned the unfortunate title 'White Elephant.'

There are many more stories to tell about the history of Lopdell House from any one of its previous lives as the Hotel Titirangi, School for the Deaf or In-Service Centre for Teachers. Lopdell House Gallery has operated as a public gallery for 18 years. Both exhibiting artists and visitors to the gallery are intrigued by the architecture and the history of the place.

In 1992 a selection of artists including Paul Cullen, Denise Kum and Peter Gibson-Smith were invited to respond to the architecture of the Gallery for the exhibition SITE. In the essay accompanying the exhibition Richard Dale wrote of 'the capacity of architecture, probably more than any other art, to prescribe and sustain consciousness.'

With a spirit of sustained consciousness about the value of our cultural heritage in Aotearoa, Lopdell House Gallery is very proud to be staging Inn-House, On the Fringe of Heaven. The exhibition features the artists Christopher Braddock, Chiara Corbelletto, Paul Cullen, Andrea Low and Marcus Williams who

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collectively employ installation as a hybrid discipline, combining multiple histories, including architecture, museology, anthropology, ethnography and sociology.

The artists have entered into a dialogue with the architectural and social history of Lopdell House. The exhibition excavates the indelible marks that remain from the original arch itecture and chronicle the various renovations over the 73 years of the building's existence.

Dr Sarah Treadwell 's essay offers a refreshing new voice within New Zealand art writing, positioning the Art and Architecture of the Pacific within a global context. Dr Treadwel l's interdisciplinary approach to the exhibition Inn-House, On the Fringe of Heaven addresses the strategies and techniques that the artists employ to investigate Lopdell House, either through a material engagement with the built object, projections into the architecture, or an activation of the site through narrative. These strategies are viewed in light of the transformative effects that they induce into the famil iar architectural structure of Lopdell House.

Inn-House, On the Fringe of Heaven draws on the rich history of this very special 'House,' recontextual ising the wealth of knowledge contained inside these walls within a contemporary framework. Many thousands of New Zealanders have experienced this building and its changes of identity throughout the years. Within the ever-changing cultural landscape of New Zealand it becomes increasingly important to hold on to our links to the past and celebrate the journey thus far.

Mary Holehan - Director/curator

Architectural abstractions, fringe effects and Lopdell House

The fringe-of-heaven installations in Lopdell House can be seen, in a counter-intuitive way, as architectural diagrams. Traditionally the diagram has been an explanatory or analytical device. Reacting against such understandings of the diagram as an essentialist tool Gilles Deleuze has positioned it as "a series of machinic forces"' and it is in this generative sense that the term is used in this essay. The generative role of the diagram is not simply representational but also productive and it will be suggested that the installations in Lopdell House effectively construct new architectural possibilities as they shape diagrams of association and occupation.

The five separate artists, Christopher Braddock, Chiara Corbelletto, Paul Cullen, Andrea Low and Marcus Williams work between the allied disciplines of architecture and installation art with forces that are operational in site and siting, plan and grounds and in matters of orientation. Diagrams of occupation and ornament are projected onto Lopdell House opening new territories and surfaces for practice and consideration.

site plan

Lopdell House has always been marginal both physically and functionally. Designed as a hotel in 1930s it was overtaken by the effects of the depression, regularly changing hands at points of failure. The building unevenly straddles an edge, one foot towards the sea and the other clinging to the land and bush in a fringe position. Cast out of the city, marginally occupied, the physical placement of Lopdell House confirms Weitze in her discussion of the frontier status of Spanish Mission style architecture.2

Seeking occupancy that could sustain what seems, in gravitational terms, to be precarious the installed works of Braddock, Corbelletto, Cullen, Low, and Williams address the architecture by way of its interiority, ornamentation, levity, and mobility. Their work recalls the building's history as a failed hotel, its brief operation as a night club, as a School for the Deaf, as a Teacher's training facility and recently, as that most marginal of occupancies, a public art gallery.

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This set of installations imagines an expanded site; a site that James Meyer suggests is "a palimpsest of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things ... It [the site] is a temporary th ing, a movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories: a place marked and swiftly abandoned. The mobile site thus courts its destruction; it is wilfully temporary; its nature is not to endure but to come down."3

Always subject to the gravitational pull of their temporary nature, the movement activated between the works, across time, seems to undermine the ostensible permanence and foundational security of the concrete reinforced architecture.

For architects, as Wigley points out, there is no site without project. "The project actually produces the site it appears to be aimed at. ... The project is the story that produces the image of the site's reality ... "'. The installed constructions offer multiple versions of site. Their locations within the building produce effects that cannot be contained by disciplinary mechanisms. History, memory and sensation elude plan, section and detail drawings which become instead partial frameworks for viewing the emergent architecture in terms of current practice.

plan

Marcus Williams activates the floor plan of the building by starting construction on the timber dance floor which was the site of a night club run at the end of the 1930s by 1 ZB personality Mr Edward Silver (aka Uncle Neddo), a well known Auckland radio announcer. Figures, metal thin, photographic layers of silver, are propped across the floor. Images of Mr Silver, multiple impostures, dance to the sounds of the past which is also the present. The murmurs of applause that link the figures are gathered from the theatre that currently occupies Lopdell House.

If tl7e artist is implicated in 17is theatrical reconstructions of Mr Silver so too the architect ol Lopdell \-louse is complexly positioned. Carrying the names of his grandfather, William Swanson, who was an active figure in the early European history of the area, architect William Reid Swanson Bloomfield's grandmother, Ani Rangi Tunoa, complicates assumptions of architecture as the preserve of European men.5

Photographs as preserved and fabricated moments of memory become emblematic in the installation. Mr Silver's lightweight, frivolous figure advertises nostalgia as the prevalent means of connecting with history colluding with its always selective vision. On the space of the dance floor, projecting horizontally, the once active body now poses in a succession of snap shots obviously engineered to maintain a precarious verticality.

Behind a wall, insulated from the world of gaiety, in what was shown on the original drawings to be an open terrace, is another cut-out figure. Two dimensional and yet carrying the excessive condition of an advertising billboard the figure recalls the world wars that sandwiched the era of the night club. Bunkered in a tight space, behind a mound of black sand, silvery with iron ore, both man and sand are subject to entropy as they slide towards the horizontal condition beneath the visual. William Swanson Reid Bloomfield, architect of Lopdell House, Captain in the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down in 1917 behind enemy lines, captured and contained as a prisoner of war.

Bloomfield and Silver are threaded through space and time to later inhabitants. Small children with heavy battery hearing­aids, looped with wire from sagging jerseys to small ears, occupied the building in its time as a School for the Deaf. Williams threads wire through the wall, between the wars, between the depression and the rubella epidemic preventing soundproofing between generations and between occupancies.

between plan and section

Rosalind Krauss suggests that to be a subject "is to experience one's toehold on the world as continually recon­structing one's place at the intersection between the vertical of one's body and the horizontal grounds on which one stands."6

In Paul Cullen's installation it is not the body that assume

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transcendency nor is it possible to assign the everyday world to the horizontal material base that polemically elevates the immaterial. Rather an experiment is constructed in which the horizontal layer of everyday is released from gravity.

Small domestic items rise or float above the plane of occupation. The installation is performative, a diagram rather than a representational device, a tool of the virtual rather than the real. Instead of being simply objects, (table, chair, radio, small electric fan etc.), the installation is a proposition on relations between stasis and mobility, about domesticity and containment, between levity and gravity; an experiment on conditions of matter freed from habitual restraint, propped against the, at times domestic, architecture of Lopdell House.

Rooms and furniture formations, traditionally inscribed by social structures, the private orders of the domestic, are here subject to scrutiny. Small contacts occur as a table and chair bump against the beams in the ceiling. A fan and a radio escape from gravity to enter field of celerity; moving bodies that can trace their line of descent and the possibility of failure come to a momentary or provisional rest against the ceiling.

This is a project that, like the work of architects Diller and Scofidio, interrogates spatial conventions of the everyday but as a diagram; the possibility of fact, not the fact itself. The installation allows access to unseen dimensions of everyday settings; the unexpected worm's eye view. The matter of everyday negotiations, commonplace comforts of home life, a chair, a table, a good read, are now adrift and airborne.

According to Deleuze and Guattari the force of gravity lies at the basis of homogenous, centring space; what they call the space of pillars. Lopdell House poised on an edge, tall and thin, seems to be organised according to the "fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity''.7 But this installation acts to reverse of the usual forces that maintain the status quo, that locate and structure everyday life. Oblique forces are loosened by the new arrangement. Supporting timbers trace trajectories that are not parallel allowing for unexpected contact and new openings; the slants on the legs of tables and chai rs induce movement.

The new architectural diagram is sustained by a provisional and temporary structure. The structure in Cullen's work complicates the status of architectural scaffolding. Scaffolding is structurally necessary but generally to be discarded when the building is completed. Cullen's work could not survive the removal of the temporary retaining structure and neither could it be in any sense the closed object that open scaffolding usually facilitates. This scaffolding is both an unnecessary appendage but it is also inescapably part of that which it maintains.

section I cut

The walls in Lopdell House are described in the architectural drawings as uniformities; surfaces constructed with concrete and reinforcing iron, plastered on the exterior. According to the conservation plan the walls are now cracking in places. Cracks in walls are architecturally a source of anxiety as sites for illicit penetration; water might seep in rusting and weakening reinforcing iron that maintains the building against the pull of gravity.

Christopher Braddock's work cuts precisely into the primary site of architectural anxiety; the wall. That which delineates and separates the outside from the interior he cuts in strategic transgressions. Unlike the work of Gordon Matta-Clark whose

five

rough cuts operate at the scale of building, Braddock's incisions into the building are surgically scaled and precisely sited to reveal specific conditions. The cuts are investigative; they don't radically challenge the, always provisional, wholeness of the building but rather point to some pathology, to some concealed condition. They reveal history as an incurable imposition on the present. Provenance labels interrogate the building as the locus of the art work obsessively detailing this pathology.

Braddock's cuts assume cavities between inner and outer skin. While cavities in teeth are sites of decay the lack of cavities in New Zealand building has caused decay. A gap between the outer wall and the internal structure is seen, in the language of the leaky building syndrome, as a 'second line of defence'. The desired condition of the cavity might be emptiness but this is rarely the situation. The isolating gap is usually filled with traces of constructional processes or insulating material attempting to achieve a separation that its own existence might destroy.

Braddock does not leave the walls to bleed their assumed emptiness into the space of the gallery but seals up the gaps as exhibition specimen. Glass covers the transgression but also reveals it and the double move is reinforced by the attachment of glass to wall. Sealant exudes around the edge of the glass, sullying its pristine condition, destroying the appearance of scientific objectivity. Sealants have a complicated history in building as Katherine Shonfield attests.8 While they repulse the threat of leaky buildings mastics also recall the insidious nature of leakage.

The violation of the surface is sealed up. The sealing in of the threat of the interior (coded feminine in popular imagery) is achieved with sticky mastics. The viscous nature of which is freed from the rigidity of constructional geometry but also needs to be contained. Braddock lets the bulge of the sealant suggest the irrepressible flow of a secret interior.

Impermeable glass maintained with sealant is compromised by a breathing grille in the glazed cover. Holes drilled for ventilation, transmission and reconnection. Certain immaterial things might be permitted to penetrate, authorised vapours, liquids, odours or words. The viewer might breath life into repressed, contained conditions of building or the miasma from the past might be allowed to seep into the present.

geometry

Lopdell House is described in architectural histories in terms of the Spanish Mission style. Defined by the use of adobe-look plaster or stucco and Cordova terracotta tile cappings, it includes the use of arches, plaster ornamentation, metal grilles and 'barley twist' columns. Lopdell House has been considered as an architecturally significant building in part because of small, geometrically detailed pieces. Decorative elements in the building, seen to have significance in conservation terms, include window surrounds, leadlight windows, tessellated floors and handrails brackets.

The status of decoration is complex in architecture which depends upon ornament to distinguish itself from building. But ornament also unsettles prevalent notions of functionality and efficiency valued in New Zealand. Chiara Corbelletto's austere and elegant work in Lopdell House, hanging screens of translucent geometry, refuses simple minded allocations. The pared back screens, precise, lacking tolerance, industrially constructed, introduce doubt about oppositional categories into the building.

Rather than voyaging outside the orthogonal, which computers now allow, Corbelletto's work precisely employs the orthogonal as the primary organisation system. The accurately shaped plates of heavy translucent film look like they should fit together to make an impervious surface but rounded corners curve away from the universal grid leaving small gaps which become spiralling stars. New figures reshape the ground as a site for constellations. Overlapped, the pieces produce small crescent moons of doubled material causing visual effects that disturb the perfection of exact geometry.

As Rajchman suggests the release from the strictly orthogonal allows "unanticipated encounter and connection, letting people see and be seen from odd angles, creating momentary little worlds ... "9 Behind the screens of translucent, overlapping geometry that Corbelletto inserts into the gallery moving figures become blurred and recoloured. Rendered partial, unexpectedly vivid details appear through the gaps in the system.

The modules of the construction, stamped out exactly, are shaped like rectangular blocks under pressure; subject to a

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prevalent force the pieces bulge and the possibility of a responsive, rather than a rigid, grid is raised. Rectilinear geometry subjected to compressive force takes on a certain roundness which in turn releases figures from within the geometry of Lopdell House; the curved edges of the pieces repeat the curvature of the stairs. To move vertically within the building is to curve away from and return to orthogonal structure.

Deleuze and Guattari writing of a protogeometry discuss the circle as "an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness [a]s a vague and fluent essence ... "10 and it seems that Corbelletto works from the precise geometric shape to articulate tendencies, inexact but rigorous, within the shapes. The hanging translucent screens are concerned with blur, with impressions, with misreading and vei ling.

Corbelletto places her screens across selected openings in the building. Openings in architecture usually allow passage; the movement of bodies, air or light. The screens are employed in Lopdell House to veil openings and permit only partial passage, incomplete access. New technology that cuts the shapes so precisely is employed to restrict modernist dreams of clarity, availability and transparent circulation; modern light that was to lay bare is reshaped in terms of fluctuation.

fly-through

As a horizontal slice through the building, the architectural plan was expected to provide a still snapshot of a consistent layer of space, frozen in time. Measurability mastered. The plan was the preferred site for picturing movement, for reading circulation as either flow or bottleneck. Movement, however, has become explicit in the architectural flythrough, a computer generated passage through architectural space. Time is no longer imaginary, or stationery but rather it has become scalar.

While the architectural object is diminished through modelling, the speed of movement in the conventional flythrough becomes hectic or out of scale. A saturated speed that renders architecture both hyperreal and impressionistic.

Andrea Low addresses the movement that has been induced into architecture through computer technologies. Architecture, a discipline criticised for its consumption of images, is here subject to an eye-of-camera scrutiny. But Low, rather than composing the building in terms of image or legibility or the conventional 'reality' effect of perspectival space, instead employs the camera as a frottage device. The viewfinder rubs up against the surfaces of the building beneficially losing disciplinary attributes of measurability and clarity.

Reading the architecture as if it were a Braille text Law's work is interested in surface sensation. Sight is utilised to undo its own privileged primacy. Synesthetic shifts between sight and sound occur as the camera feels it way across the surfaces of the building which can no longer be discerned as an object. Architecture becomes a mobile skin of surface effects. Dreamy blues and greens slide the material building into an indeterminate haze even as the camera registers the fawn, pink and white of the building very accurately.

Low examines the building with tactile intent. Mosaic pieces in the tessellated bathroom floors shimmer becoming wire bird cages as the roaming passage of the camera dissolves the figurative. Handrails lose any sense of functional shaping but retain patterns of light and the flicker of movement, up and down. Caught in the surface-stream a moment of stil lness collects in an empty bath. Time changes pace.

Architecture is imagined through a process of dematerialisa­tion. Losing clarity and legibility. the shimmering surface of Lopdell House that Low constructs overlaps the material building as a screen effect. Projected onto a screen within the gallery space Law's work reveals the screen like nature of the building, Lopdell House, which is a sheet of a building with many perforations. Law's work, disrupting habitual patterns of seeing, operates as an interference pattern, reinforcing the architecture of Lopdell House even as it differs from the material

seven

geometries. The overlapping of the two architectures creates the possibilities of new formations in the beat between.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about abstractions releasing other space, mapping other territories and extending the reach of conventional disciplinary operations. Rather than being reductive these new architectural diagrams, works of art practice, as abstractions have made the space of Lopdell House multiple and dense rather than rarefied; they have provoked light space rather than pure space. Complex rather than simple or simplifying these architectural diagrams comment critically on habitual conditions of viewing and inhabiting the architecture of Lopdell House.

Sarah Treadwell, 2003

Senior Lecturer - School of Architecture, University of Auckland.

1 Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries, N.Y.: Universe Publishing, 1999, p. 29.

2 Karen J Weitze, California's Mission Revival, Santa Monica: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc. 1984, p. 3.

3 James Meyer, "The Functional Site; or, The transformation of Site Specificity" in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderburg (ed.}, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 25.

4 Mark Wigley, "On Site", in 19th Triennale di Milano catalogue, Identity and difference: integration and plurality in today's forms: cultures between the ephemeral and the lasting ... Milano: Electa, 1996, p. 21 .

5 Dick Scott, Fire on the Clay: The Pakeha comes to West Auckland, Auckland: Southern Cross Books, 1979.

6 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cam b. Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1998, p. 183.

7 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1987, p. 370.

8 Katherine Shonfield, Walls have feelings: architecture, film and the city, London and N.Y. : Routledge, 2000.

9 John Rajchman, Constructions, Camb. Mass. : The MIT Press, 1998, p. 90.

10 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,1987, p. 367.

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Artists' Biographies

CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

Christopher Braddock graduated with a Master of Arts from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1989. Since that time he has exhibited regularly in New Zealand and overseas and his work is represented in numerous private and public collections. Recent exhibitions include the group show BODYLOGUE with Gavin Hipkins and Kiki Smith at Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland and Past presents: Looking into the art collection at Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, curated by Natasha Conland. Braddock was co-curator of Votive: sacred & ecstatic bodies at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2001-2002.

Christopher Braddock is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design at Auckland University of Technology. He exhibits with Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland I Sydney, Bartley Nees Gallery in Wellington and Galerie Romerapotheke in Zurich. Braddock has recently been awarded Creative New Zealand's four-month International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) artist residency in New York, which he will undertake in February 2004.

CHIARA CORBELLETTO

Chiara Corbelletto graduated from Modigliani Art School in Italy in 1973 and gained a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Milano, in 1979. She first travelled to New Zealand in 1981 and worked in art conservation and subsequently in interior design. Corbelletto has exhibited in Italy and extensively in New Zealand since 1987. In 2003 her work was included in the exhibition Living Room curated by William McAloon, the third Goodman Suter Biennial, Nelson. Other exhibitions include Changing Spaces, Wellington, 2002, Umbra Penumbra, Sydney, 2001 and Furniture in Context, Dowse Museum, Lower Hutt, 1999.

Chiara Corbelletto is represented by Bartley Nees Gallery, Wellington and her works are held in public, corporate and private collections.

eighteen

PAUL CULLEN

Paul Cullen is currently a Doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland and Principal Lecturer Research, Subject Coordinator Sculpture at Manukau School of Visual Arts. In 2002 Cullen received an MIT Research Grant to attend Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt and Documenta 11 in Kassel Germany.

Cullen's first solo exhibition was in 1975 and he has been exhibiting regularly since that time. Cullen's work has featured in a number of group exhibitions in 2003 including Wonderland, at Auckland 's Artspace; Portraiture - the art of social commentary, curated by Rhoda Fowler, Te Tu hi, Pakuranga, and 'Shooting Star -Nine Dragons 8th International Environmental Art Symposium, Chung-Buk, Korea.

ANDREA LOW

Andrea Low is a lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Low graduated from Elam in 1998 with an MFA (Hons) Sculpture. Recent exhibitions include The Word Te Wa - The Space, Wanganui, 2003 and Sculpture on the Gulf, Waiheke Island. Andrea Law's work was included in the 2000 Noumea Biennale d'Art Contemporain, Tjibaou Centre, Noumea. In addition to her work as an artist and lecturer Andrea Low has also published essays on a number of contemporary New Zealand artists including Louise Purvis, Caroline Rothwell and Lisa Crowley.

MARCUS WILLIAMS

Marcus Williams has exhibited in numerous multi-media installation projects in New Zealand and overseas since 1994. He has also been involved in a number of collaborative partnerships with other artists including Susan Jowsey, Eugene Hansen and Allan MacDonald. In 1997 a collaborative sculpture created with Eugene Hansen entitled The Hi-Culturalist won a Merit award in the Visa Gold Art Awards. Williams was the Sarjeant Gallery's artist in residence in 2003 and undertook a residency at the Stanzione di Topolo in Italy in 2002. In 2004 he wil l undertake a six week artist residency in Estonia. Marcus Williams graduated with an MFA from Melbourne's RMIT and is currently employed as a Lecturer in Photography and Design at UNITEC, Auckland.

nineteen

Lopdell House Gallery

gratefully acknowledge funding from <:re at 1ve ~

••• .. • l

CREEK

AR.TS COUNCIL OF NEW ZEALAND Toi AOTMROA

and would like to thank their sponsors

Portage Trust

~ Waitakere City Council

Te Taiao o Waitakere

Working for you

Published by Lopdell House Gallery, Waitakere City, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2003.

ISBN 0-958207 4-9-6

© 2003 Lopdell House Gallery and the artists.

Design and photography [cover, gallery and installations] by Hamish Macdonald

Print management by Image Centre Limited, Auckland.

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Lopdell House Gallery