The Blue Room: 13 artists respond in a psychic way

Thirteen artists respond in a psychic way

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‘The paranormal… taps into our emotions, h opes, and fears.’

Lars Ban Larsen

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When artists are invited to respond ‘in a psychic way’ to a site, city or idea, what emerges?

Contemporary artistic responses to the occult deal with space beyond the real. There is a shift from concern about surface, to affect (emotional and embodied responses). This contemporary ‘spiritual in art’ is distinct from modernist transcendentalism in its engagement with the social. Lars Bang Larsen suggests that current occult art can potentially expose ‘cracks in the logic of the spectacle and the post-cold war notion that there is no outside to the present order’.1 Hence the quizzical gaze coaxed into play by contemporary occult art may in turn swivel onto the spectacle of consumerist cultural phantoms, revealing the machine inside the ghost.

A fascination with the otherworldly has informed my practice for many years, both through reading the term as ‘an alternative worldview’, to the more commonly understood ‘paranormal’. I was intrigued to see how other artists would respond ‘in a psychic way’ to a place or idea. What would ‘psychic’ mean to them, and what kind of artwork would emerge? The eponymous ‘Blue Room’ was a house in the deep south of Edwardian New Zealand, where Spiritualists,

1. Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The surface no longer holds: Affect, powerlessness and obscene fluctuations of meaning in new occult art’, Reading Room: a journal of art and culture, Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2008, issue 2, page 66.

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Clive Chapman and his niece, Pearl Judd conducted séances.2 For this project, I invited twelve other artists: Elle Loui August, Bekah Carran, Andrea du Chatenier, Louise Clifton, Violet Faigan, Lonnie Hutchinson, Saskia Leek, Louise Menzies, Dane Mitchell, Rebecca Pilcher, Johanna Sanders and Stuart Shepherd to join me in channeling the idea of the ‘Blue Room’ into our existing practices.

Writers Rebecca Rice and Jon Bywater have each contributed their responses to the show. Rice has discussed The Blue Room in the context of New Zealand’s history as a utopian settlement, and the corresponding flowering of alternative spiritualities and belief systems. In his essay, Bywater has drawn links between the artwork, the role of contemporary art and artists, and the psychic, whatever we deem that to be, or do.

Pippa Sanderson - curator

2. The Blue Room: Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-toVoice Communication in BROAD LIGHT with Souls who have Passed into THE GREAT BEYOND. Written by Clive Chapman and ghostwriter, G.A.W, Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1927.

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Curator’s acknowledgements A heart felt thank you to the artists and writers for their warm and enthusiastic response to The Blue Room invitation. Thanks to the designer Duncan Munro for his patience and generosity.

Thank you also to the galleries: Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin for accepting the show when it was still a speculative notion, and Te Manawa Museum Trust and Hastings City Art Gallery, our first touring venues, and publication partners.

Finally, I am immensely grateful to our sponsors: Chartwell Trust, and Dunedin City Council for supporting the artists to make new work, and The James Wallace Arts Trust, UCOL, Jim and Mary Barr, Jonathan Smart Gallery and Hamish Mc Kay Gallery for helping to make the publication of this catalogue possible.

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Is it still heimlich to you in your country when strangers are f elling your woods?

Sigmund Freud

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Spirited spaces From its first imaginings, New Zealand was founded on the utopian schemes and dreams of those who sought a better life on the mythical shores of these antipodean islands. Conceptualised as a highly advanced colony, a place of opportunity, as well as a place of refuge, tolerance and democratic values, New Zealand’s utopian conception contributed to the flourishing of alternative spiritualities and belief systems from first settlement to the present day.

The Blue Room, the spiritual space at the centre of this exhibition, was one branch of the spiritualist tree.1 First based in Dunedin and later moving to Masterton, the activities of the Blue Room coincided with the rekindling of spiritualism in the 1920s and 1930s. This resurgence responded directly to the aftermath of World War I when the unwavering belief in the dominant narratives of Empire and Religion began to break down, pre-empting the ultimate pluralism of the post-modern era. Modernity, in short, was not living up to its promises. As theologist Vernon White wrote, ‘The bracing world of modernity with its own priests of rationality, liberated us from superstition, but it also left us a dull, one-dimensional, unconvincing world’.2 This world proved fertile ground for the flowering of alternative spiritualities.

1. Clive Chapman, The Blue Room: Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-to-Voice Communication in BROAD LIGHT with Souls Who Have Passed into the GREAT BEYOND, Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1927.

2. Vernon White, cited in Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West volume 1, London: T & T Clark International, 2004, p. 43.

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The intersection of these historical manifestations with contemporary practice is the space I wish to explore here: opening up a wormhole between the past and the present, between science and art, and between belief and scepticism.

The perfect medium Spiritualism claimed to be based on rational principles and had two principal tenets: that the spirit exists beyond the body and that the living can communicate with the dead. From its inception spiritualism enlisted methods of scientific inquiry to prove the existence of ‘the other side’ and spirit photography was crucial to this project.

In its co-option of this emergent medium, spiritualism aligned itself with rationality while exploiting the slippery scope of photography. Neither definitively science nor art, photography was, if you like, the perfect medium of spiritualism. Thus spiritualism found its potency and ‘proof’ in a liminal space of tension between empiricism and belief.

The camera, received as evidentiary medium, proved to be responsive to the sensitive human medium, who could prove his or her skills by summoning spirits and ectoplasmic matter onto the photographic plate.

The American William Howard Mumler took the first spirit photograph in 1861, and most famously took a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln with her late husband, President Abraham Lincoln, appearing behind her. Reports of Mumler’s miraculous photographs filtered to New Zealand, as did his 1869

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trial for fraud.3 Although acquitted, Mumler was ultimately discredited, but not before producing hundreds of spirit photographs for wealthy Americans. The spirits, it seemed, could not be ‘called “from the vasty deep” for less than ten dollars per head’.4 To our twenty-first century eyes, many spirit photographs look unpersuasive, executed with all the bravado of B-grade horror movies. Techniques such as double exposure, the use of photo-sensitive materials, props and lighting, as well as pure accident, were used to produce these supposedly paranormal images, and their effectiveness relied on the popular conviction that the camera could not lie.5 And contemporary audiences were convinced – for a time. By 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lecture on spirit photography in Dunedin apparently pushed his audience beyond belief, leaving them to conclude that the rational insights of Sherlock Holmes had at last eluded his creator.

The relationship between the photographic and paranormal has, nonetheless, retained a hold on the imagination. Pippa Sanderson, Johanna Sanders and e l. august and l. a clifton have each looked back to these historical origins. Sanderson’s Quest I (2008) and Quest II (2008) employ a technical adjustment that overexposes the aged Polaroid film, revealing a milky ectoplasmic substance oozing from an otherwise bland 3. See, for example, ‘The wonders of spiritualism and photography: taking the likenesses of ghosts’, in Daily Southern Cross, Auckland, 15 September 1869, p. 7.

4. Ibid.

5. A comprehensive overview of spirit photography can be found in Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult Occult, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

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hotel interior. Sanders’ video projection Hauntology 101 (2008) invokes a spectral figure in floating gown that fleetingly taunts the audience, supplanting the ‘priority of being and presence’ with the possibility of a ghost that is ‘neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive’, suggesting that the present is perhaps neither as solid nor as self-sufficient as we expect.6 In “

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(2008) e l. august and l. a clifton have opened a portal for a spirit named Eos after the Greek goddess of dawn, who reveals herself in a variety of guises. These works revel in the prospect of seeking out the unseen but, in contrast to nineteenth-century spirit photography, they free the medium from its documentary role and use it to investigate the subjective possibilities of the fabulous.

Parlour games Nineteenth-century spiritualism made its home in the Victorian parlour, a space where the audience was prepared to suspend disbelief in the face of often clumsy, mechanically-produced phenomena. Bekah Carran’s You, Me and the Radiant Light (2008) references this polite, yet theatrical setting, creating an installation where viewers can step outside the present into a space of soothing light with charismatic appeal. She re-enchants the gallery by creating a space of refuge, as does Andrea du Chatenier with Wishland (2008), a magic carpet where spells can be cast and wishes come true. Wishland conceptually miniaturises New Zealand and its erstwhile status as a utopian colony, creating a space where anything is 6. See Colin Davis, ‘Hauntology, spectres and phantoms’, in French Studies, London: Oxford University Press, 2005, 59 (3), pp. 373-379.

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possible, as long as you’ve downloaded the right spell.

The signs of séance phenomena became rather elaborate over the course of the nineteenth century, but began more simply in 1848, when the Fox sisters in America claimed they could communicate with spirits by raps and sounds. New Zealand found its own version of this phenomenon in the Nation household in Masterton in 1883.7 There, ten year old Bertha was found to be able to move objects, such as tables and chairs, with the lightest touch. Rebecca Pilcher’s Easy Chair (2008), with its breathing cushion and distorted soundtrack, revisits those celebrated spiritualist manifestations, where inanimate objects become animated by some invisible, presumably otherworldly force, creating an uncanny presence in the domestic realm.

In addition to materialisations, spirit photographs and visions, spirits communicated via automatic writing and drawing.

Another of the Nation sisters, Bella, became adept at slate mediumship, and would inscribe messages on a board whilst in a trance. Violet Fagan and Saskia Leek correspond via a telepathic version of such clairvoyant communication in Across the miles, I hear you clearly (2008), to produce drawings, collages and text that are obsessively recorded in separate notebooks. In contrast to this active, ongoing communication across time and space, Dane Mitchell’s Spell Materials (Communication Spell) (2008) are immobilised, potentially rendered permanently impotent behind the glass frame.

7. Robert Elwood, Islands of the Dawn: The story of alternative spirituality in New Zealand, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993, pp. 38-40.

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The spaces between While some kind of ‘record’ normally resulted from communications with the other side, several works in this exhibition are poised in the spaces between technology and spirituality, between our unspoken desires and our physical presence in the world. Stuart Shepherd’s installation The Other Side (2008) physically separates connected individuals, as embracing couples, filmed from over each other’s shoulders, are viewed on back-to-back television monitors. Shepherd plays on the psychic scope of the exhibition to question just what the relationship between spirituality, media and people is in contemporary society. Louise Menzies’ Untitled (Tempting Fate) (2008), a bald statement on a sepia-toned banner, seems both a warning and an invitation, reiterating a time-worn phrase that speaks of our suspicions relating to what is said and unsaid: the notion that unseen and unknown forces respond to our desires as they are expressed or withheld from one another, or even from ourselves.

Unknown forces are similarly the subject of Lonnie Hutchinson’s Hoodoo Voodoo, … and the Kingfisher (2008). Given Hutchinson’s interest in blackbirding, the historical ‘recruitment’ of Polynesians and Aboriginals for labour and the sex slave trade, Hoodoo Voodoo, … and the Kingfisher draws a connection between this little acknowledged practice and the African slave trade.

The alternative religions of Voodoo and Hoodoo developed as a result of this African diaspora and through the hybridisation of non-western and orthodox western religions. Hoodoo Voodoo, … and the Kingfisher then, stands here as a reminder of alternative

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religions that pre-existed or emerged in resistance to European colonisation throughout the globe.

Keeping House Is it still heimlich to you in your country when strangers are felling your woods?8 We do housekeeping in an attempt to keep hold of the fragile domestic order in our lives; these works draw on the otherworldly to heighten our understanding of just how fragile that reality we try to ‘keep’ might be. These contemporary investigations use art to reflect upon the nature of the paranormal in the modern world. While some of these works may unsettle those unaccustomed to thinking about the occult or the other-worldly, at their root are fundamental questions about being and presence in this world, as well as about being here, now, in New Zealand. How at home are we in this world or this place? To what extent is our experience an unheimlich or ‘unhomely’ one, despite persistent attempts to realise this place as spiritual utopia? These works suggest possibilities for becoming re-enchanted through heimlichkeiten or the magic arts, of becoming more at home by accepting the un-certainties of existence rather than attempting to confine or stabilise it.

Rebecca Rice 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in On creativity and the unconscious, New York: Harper and Row, 1958, p. 126.

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Ineffable, unprovable things: the experience of a rt as mediumship.

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You cannot see both screens of Stuart Shepherd’s two channel video work at once. Facing in opposite directions, side by side, the blocky monitors on plinths faintly echo Brancusi’s The Kiss (1908), each showing an opposite view of a series of embracing couples. They are seen in the gallery, then, as they might be in real space, from one side at a time. At eye level, these people face us over their partner’s shoulders. When our gaze is returned, it is sometimes self-consciously, sometimes with an accepting smile. We watch someone adjust to the camera and her look soften as she becomes grounded by, absorbed in and removed from us in the hug.

In The Other Side (2008) what is physically directly behind us could be an analogue for a view of ourselves as we are known by an intimate, something we might sense but cannot see.

The piece models the way that within a couple an individual is connected to, but forever blocked from knowing directly, an external view of herself. But beyond this, it shows there is something within each couple — familiarity, intuition, trust, love, we might name it — another “other side” that although somehow palpable to us looking on, we can’t access simply by walking around to it.

The twinned positions within Violet Faigan and Saskia Leek’s Across the miles, I hear you clearly (2008) are the opposite way around. Two child-sized chairs face one another across a low table. At each seat there is a scrapbook. Corresponding dates over a period leading up to the show further establish a relationship between the two sets of collages and drawings.

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A pair of wooden hands made from a case for carbolic soap lie on the floor, glove stretchers dislodged from their historical use to become prostheses or symbols, evoking the possibility of reaching and touching at a physical remove.

Page by page, magazine clippings of mid-20th century floral parade floats, photographs of beach towels, careful portraits and childlike abstractions cumulatively reveal something in common between the simultaneous sequences. Beyond format and particular coincidences, their distinct aesthetics are connected by a related sensibility. As with Shepherd’s work, we are presented with the everyday ineffable of mutual understanding.

Emphasising a different relation between subjectivities, the image formed by the patterned cloth and cloth letters of Louise Menzies’ Untitled (Tempting Fate) (2008) faces us. The concept “fate” puts our control of things in question, naming the way we might prejudice an outcome or be “asking for” something, our desires leaking out through carelessness or wishful thinking perhaps. The immediate ambiguity of the cloud-complex background and the flip-flopping pun offer us a Rorschachian mirror in which we might see what we are looking for by looking at it.

Like the coincidences or communications in Faigan and Leek’s parallel diaries, Menzies’ kōan-like phrase is suggestive but agnostic, asking to be read — as art, of course, but perhaps also as a representation of something about the psychic.

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Whether the word “tempting” is taken to be descriptive (making a particular fate, or fate in general, tempting) or an action (naming someone’s act of risking an outcome) depends, of course, on us as viewers and is in itself an unknowable, unprovable thing.

Certain tendencies in art have cast the artist’s role as something akin to mediumship. Although already implicit in the Roman concept of inspiration, Romanticism and Expressionism are movements where this idea of the artist is especially clear: she is able to channel something from the beyond, so to speak, to communicate perceptions due to a special sensitivity. Against this background, works like Shepherd’s, Faigan and Leek’s, and Menzies’ in The Blue Room, respond to the spiritualist history referred to in the exhibition’s title, by relating art and the mysterious in other ways.

Rather than the artist as medium, a work like Across the miles, I hear you clearly positions art itself as a medium in which to experience our own sensitivities. In it, we might see ways in which items from the past “speak to” people, and aesthetic decisions communicate for and connect them. The actions of selecting and saving that a scrapbook prescribes, and the more general artistic gesture of representation, both hold the possibility of sharing and communicating something at a distance. In this connection, Lonnie Hutchinson’s large paintings on paper Hoodoo Voodoo, …and the Kingfisher (2008) also remind us of art’s power to call people together to

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consider a story, and to summon the past within the present.

Linked in the title, Hutchison’s dark, wild-haired woman and her bird on a perch suggest a fable. The white term for African American practices, “hoodoo” is jammed with the Haitian term “voodoo”, mixing magic from both black and white points of view. Sitting in front of a silhouette of the harakeke plant, Kingfisher — locally kōtare — connects our bird mythology to a North American one. The moral may not be clear, but the metaphysical question regarding the supernatural — what is real? — has a cultural politics. While local colonial conditions favoured pakeha spiritualisms, as Rebecca Rice here discusses, we might remember that the Tohunga Suppression Act (1907), for example, declared aspects of indigenous spirituality illegal.

The triangle of artist, audience and work — and so our active role as viewers — is suggested by Bekah Carran’s title You, Me and the Radiant Light (2008). Ambiguous but rich in its allusion to existing communities of belief and visual and spatial conventions, the work recalls both Expressionist architecture and grocery box hut making. Her intimate cardboard cubbyhole offers a space for private contemplation that works a kind of physical uplift through its tilted floor.

The popular art in the backlit mandala inside — a cathedral window collage of bedroom poster reminders of wonder (photographs of the night sky, sunrises or sunsets) — and the plain brown cardboard, subtly convey the possibility of making such things for ourselves.

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The bright, woolly island of Andrea du Chatenier’s Wishland (2008) likewise presents a handmade space for focusing attention. Crafted in the spirit of home comforts, the warm pink and brown ritual rug with beanbag mountain comes with a set of printed cards, a sampling of spells sourced from the internet. As much as the beyond, they speak about domestic desires — to “get lucky”, to be secure — revealed in the e-commerce version of magic, in proprietary downloads by authors including MagikalDude2. On our behalf, the artist also paid to have the gallery put under a spell to make the paranormal specially visible.

The gallery itself, though, and the contemporary art context may not be neutral in this regard. In bringing together the traditional Western art convention of framing, and traditional Western magic, Dane Mitchell’s Spell Materials (Communication Spell) (2008) points this up. Behind glass on the wall, his spell is shown as a specimen, its secret ingredients presented evidentially, in the manner of conceptualist performance residue. The work keeps a secret, respectful of the collaborating witch’s: we understand that the liquid and powder we can see, but not identify, may lose their power if they are named publicly.

The authority of the frame, and its connotations of modernist inquiry, however, underscore the inherently sceptical mood of the white-walled gallery. Rather than screening the spell from this, the work’s stance could be “you see what you see, I’m not saying”. Perhaps an artwork, too, has to be

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experienced to be understood, and can’t be known by the sceptical but only by those attuned to the practice. The wall that divides the sceptic from the believer is that the position of each is self-affi rming.

On the question of evidence, photographic technologies have a prominent role in the modern history of investigations of the paranormal. In Pippa Sanderson’s works, Quest I (2008) and Quest II (2008) the medium’s role as medium is foregrounded, chemical sensitivity showing us things otherwise invisible to human perception. The artist manipulates her well-named Polaroid Spirit 600 to conjure the beauty of glow and blur, suggestive of mood and the presence of memories in the places depicted. Recalling du Chatenier’s homely location of the supernatural, the reality of “housework” looms in all this, grounding the mystery in the everyday.

Using video, Johanna Sanders’ Hauntology 101 (2008) returns us to a standard Western figuration of the ghostly presence, the person under a sheet. We see, more precisely, a woman in an old fashioned nightdress. The title plays up the conventionality of this sign of the paranormal, and encourages us to study it: a long white gown makes someone’s body nebulous, barely there, vulnerable because only half-dressed, but also confronting, something that perhaps should not be seen because dressed for the privacy of bed. Mocking up what might be taken as a sign of a ghost, the artist’s carefully masked projection reinforces the apparition’s lack of credibility.

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The mechanically breathing cushion and the speaking seat in Rebecca Pilcher’s Easy Chair (2008) also replay fun fair ghost train tricks. Suspension of disbelief being harder in the gallery, the exposed illusions contribute to the comment on negative realities of spiritualism. The obviously un-easy chair dramatises the ranting of an evangelist. His possession, and its angry energy, sample the exploitation of fears that are part of a talkback radio reality of belief, presenting both its power and its obvious fakery.

Digital effects assist e l. august and l. a clifton to “channel” Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn. In their invisibly titled series, “

” (2008) the rising sun becomes a dry ice

white space. The anonymity of the luminous faceless figures, and the ambiguity of the signs made by the hands, and the significance of the red, violet, and blue robes all charge the images with the power of ritual and secrecy sensed in Mitchell’s work. The pointed headdresses allude to the 1910 portrait of Aleister Crowley wearing the headdress of Horus, raising the spectre of secondhand bookshop occultism, Thelemic thought and the Golden Dawn tradition, while refreshing the sense of something actively created, like Carran’s cave.

In various ways, each of these eleven works could be read as an hypothesis about “the psychic”. Pieces like e l. august and l. a clifton’s icons, Pilcher’s preacher, and Mitchell’s and du Chatenier’s spells, represent images and practices associated with magic, with varying kinds of

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investments in them. They, and Sanderson’s photography, Sanders’ video projection and Hutchinson’s human and animal characters explore forms that have been used to visualise and narrate the inexplicable. Faigan and Leek’s correspondence, and Shepherd’s embraces relate to experiences of perceiving and knowing the ineffable less clearly coded as the province of the supernatural. Offering tools with which to tune our perception, as much as they refer to things outside art, Carran’s walk-in prism and Menzies’ word-image might offer metaphors for art itself.

From this last possibility, it is interesting to consider a general alignment of art and the psychic, already suggested in this account of the exhibition. After Romanticism and Surrealism, Western art practice shares a similar cultural position with the psychic, in that both act as supplements to the dominant culture’s investment in the instrumental and the rational.

Exceeding, even resisting analysis and description, our experience of art is one where we can appropriately find significance in things that in an everyday context we might not take to be meaningful, and our intuition plays at full stretch. Encountering the works, then, our role is comparable to mediumship. Valuing the subjective, individual perception and the personal, the works here remind us — as psychic phenomena might — of the limits of the readily grasped or the easily spoken, gesturing beyond them to more evanescent, fresh, or deeper truths.

Jonathan Bywater

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[ List of works and biographies

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Page 36 – 39

Bekah Carran You, Me and the Radiant Light 2008 cardboard, plastic, tape, lights, CD player, CD entrance: 75 x 75cm, depth 300cm, height 200cm

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Andrea du Chatenier Wishland 2008 wool, fur, sheep and goat skulls, candles, cards 200cm x 200cm x 80cm Wishland spell: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=R7HTdCfVNGY

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e l. august and l. a clifton, channeling Eos “ ” 2008 three framed photographs 74cm x 54cm each

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Lonnie Hutchinson Hoodoo Voodoo, … and the Kingfisher 2008 two acrylic on paper paintings, unframed 200cm x 150cm each

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Saskia Leek and Violet Faigan Across the miles, I hear you clearly 2008

two scrapbooks, small desk, two stools, wooden hands 130cm x 40cm x 58cm

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Louise Menzies Untitled (Tempting Fate) 2008 unframed silk 75cm x 126cm

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Dane Mitchell Spell Materials (Communication Spell) 2008 picture frame containing six test tubes containing undisclosed materials 62.5cm x 62.5cm Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite

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Rebecca Pilcher Easy Chair 2008 cushion, breathing mechanism, armchair, ipod, speakers, D battery, lamp approximately 100cm x 80cm x 80cm additional breathing tracks and original recording conversion by Sneakybeats

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Johanna Sanders Hauntology 101 2008 DVD, data projector, DVD player projected image 200cm x 250cm

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Pippa Sanderson Quest I, Quest II 2008 Lamda photographic prints each 91cm x 89cm

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Stuart Shepherd The Other Side 2008 television monitors, plinths, board, DVD players 90cm x 170cm x 40cm

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Bekah Carran is a Dunedin based artist who received a BFA from Otago School of Fine Art in 1998. She was a recipient of Olivia Spencer Bower and Physics Room residencies, and her recent projects include I Remember Golden Light in the nationwide One Day Sculpture series (2009).

Andrea Du Chatenier gained an MFA from RMIT in 1998, was on the Board of Directors of Art Space for many years, and Tylee Cottage artist in residence from 2001-2002. Recent shows include Mind Games: Surrealism in Aotearoa, New Zealand at Hastings City Art Gallery (2009). Du Chatenier is represented by Mary Newton Gallery in Wellington.

Eos is an Interdimensional Magnetic Artist from the substrata Soileh. She has undergone spiritual training in several galaxies specializing in Radionics and The Templates of the Outer Light. Eos is currently located in the subtle emanations from The Grand Central Sun, where she comprises one section of a radionic wall in The Temple of The Presence. Eos would like to thank her channellers, e l. august and l. a clifton for their sustained tone during this trans-dimensional Transmission.

Violet Faigan has a BFA from Canterbury School of Fine Arts, and was on the original board of High Street Project in Christchurch. She has been exhibiting in public galleries and artist-run spaces throughout New Zealand and Australia since 1994, including Money for Nothing (2003), Artspace, Auckland, and Sao Paulo Biennale in 2004.

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Lonnie Hutchinson (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Waea, Ngāti Mūruka, Ngāti Hamō) has a Bachelor of Design (3D Design) from UNITEC (1998). She was included in Public/private Tumatānui/Tumatāiti, 2nd Auckland Triennial (2004). Residencies include Banff Art Centre, Canada and the Indigenous Lab, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide.

Saskia Leek has a BFA from Canterbury School of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas, including Bright Paradise, 1st Auckland Triennial (2001) and Better Places, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2008-9).

Louise Menzies has a BFA from Massey University. Recent exhibitions include Break: Towards a public realm at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2009). Menzies is a contributing editor to the online magazine Natural Selection as well as writing for various catalogues, including Telecom Prospect 2007: New Art New Zealand.

Dane Mitchell studied at AIT (now AUT) and regularly shows his work in New Zealand and abroad. He has been awarded residencies at the Gasworks, UK (2008) and DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (2009), and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland and A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro.

Rebecca Pilcher has an MFA (Hons) from Massey University.

Recent projects include Short Suite at the City Gallery, Wellington (2008). Pilcher’s work is represented in private collections in Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland.

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Johanna Sanders aka VJ Joie de Vivre is a video artist, editor and VJ, with an MFA from Massey University and a BA in Philosophy from Waikato University. Sanders has exhibited video installations and photography nationwide, and has made award winning works for the New Zealand Fringe Festival.

Pippa Sanderson has a BA (Hons) in Art History from Victoria University and an MFA from Massey University.

Sanderson has written for publications in New Zealand, Australia and Canada and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Recent projects include Utopia or Oblivion (2008) at Room 103 in Auckland.

Stuart Shepherd gained an MFA in painting from RMIT in 1999. His work has been shown in public galleries in New Zealand and overseas. Recent curatorial projects, in collaboration with Arts Access Aotearoa, have taken place in New York at the Outsider Art Fair and the Fountain Art Fair in Paris with Gallerie Impaire.

Jonathan Bywater is widely published in the fields of art and music, and is Programme Leader for Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Arts. He is a member of the collectives Cuckoo (http://www.cuckoo.org.nz) and Local Time (http://local-time. net), and a regular contributor to Artforum and The Wire.

Rebecca Rice has an MA in Art History from Victoria University where she is currently working as a part-time lecturer, and studying towards her PhD. She has presented her research at local and international conferences, and has been the Wellington columnist for Art New Zealand since 2004.

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The Blue Room: 13 artists respond in a psychic way Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, 22 October – 15 November 2008 Te Manawa Museum Trust, 20 June – 11 October 2009 Hastings City Art Gallery, 6 February – 18 April 2010 Curator: Pippa Sanderson Writers: Jonathan Bywater and Rebecca Rice Publication designer: Duncan Munro Printer: Milne Print Limited Published in 2009 in Aotearoa New Zealand by Utopia Press, 41 Drummond Street, Mount Cook, Wellington 6021, Te Manawa Museum Trust, 326 Main Street, Palmerston North 4440, and Hastings City Art Gallery, 201 Eastbourne Street, Hastings, Hawke’s Bay 4122.

Copyright: the writers, artists and curator. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-473-15276-5 Cover image: e l. august and l. a clifton, “

” 2008 (detail).

Frontispiece: Drawing of ‘Wee Betty’, The Blue Room, Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1927.

Jonathan Smart Gallery www.jonathansmartgallery.com

Jim and Mary Barr www.overthenet.blogspot.com