Artist’s signs of the times

MASTER OF RUST

Artist Alex Milne ditched his corporate job in Auckland and moved to the Bay to focus on creating pieces inspired by the lost American dream.

WORDS ANA COTTE PHOTOS COLIN LUNT & KIM WESTERSKOV B ay of Plenty artist Alex Miln is obsessed with rust. His striking, three-dimensional pieces drip and drizzle and splatter with it, each work the result of up to a thousand hours of painstaking, detailed, skilful effort. If you look closely, you can see that Alex’s rust has many, many colours in it – light and dark browns, blacks and blues, pinks and greys. “There is so much beauty in rust,” he says. “I could paint it all day.”

And he pretty much does. Alex gave up his corporate job in Auckland six years ago and now works afternoon shifts at a local petrol station in Pāpāmoa so that he can paint in the mornings when the light is best. He is truly dedicated – as you need to be when it can take six months to a year to finish just one artistic creation.

Alex calls his art practice ‘signtology’. His works, mostly very large, are made of wood-shape-like signs – the type of broken down, faded neon sign you might see outside a dilapidated motel in the American Midwest. Hence the rust.

“THERE IS SO MUCH BEAUTY IN RUST. I COULD PAINT IT ALL DAY.”

“My art is deeply rooted in Americana,” Alex says. “It’s a statement about broken societies, decaying societies, fallen apart societies… the myth of the quintessential American dream, which is also a New Zealand myth. I think it’s important we question the stories we tell ourselves.”

It has taken decades for Alex’s art to come to fruition. He enjoyed success as a young artist in Auckland in the early 1980s, becoming a finalist in a prestigious Auckland arts award and holding a solo exhibition at a Symonds Street café soon after. He began investigating his uniquely personal style of art after spending time in Europe and North America where he took photos of old signs. “I travelled through the American Midwest, listening to people’s life stories and taking in the scenery from the back seat of a greyhound bus. This was supposed to be the richest country in the world, but it looked as if it was dying. Seeing that ignited a fire within me. It’s still there, and it’s been the focus of my art ever since.”

On returning to New Zealand, Alex tried to recreate the neon signs in his photographs as three-dimensional art but couldn’t make it work. In fact, it took nearly a decade to figure out that a combination of ply, balsa wood and strips of aluminium would create a frame that was large and sturdy but still light enough to lift and hang on a wall. After prepping the ply surface, Alex’s technique then involves applying up to 11 coats of oil paint, layering in a slightly translucent way to give depth. Aluminium tubing takes the place of neon. Why neon? “It’s expressive, it creates interesting shapes and forms. Neon is the pinnacle of signage.” It took another decade for Alex to patiently build his first body of work. While much of it reflected the Americana theme, he also experimented with Kiwiana/ Māoriland pieces. “We have our own myths and perceptions. We have myths about racism, about having free and open access to beaches. We need to challenge those myths.”

In 2015, three decades after coming up with the original concept, Alex was finally ready to go public. “I thought the best way to get known was to enter art awards,” he says. It worked. That first year, he was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards. The following year, in 2016, he was a double finalist in the National Contemporary Art Awards and winner of the Miles Supreme Award. At the time, Miles Award judge Ane Tonga described his entry Genuine Miles as “an incredibly clever play on form, function and medium that kept me coming back”.

Other kudos followed. More award recognition, then a successful solo exhibition in Wellington in 2019 and involvement in a Cuba Dupa group exhibition in the city the following year. He is currently collaborating with Peter Alsop, author of Selling the Dream, the Art of Early New Zealand Tourism, to develop a collection to exhibit in Wellington in 2024/25. Peter is writing the words that will go on Alex’s rusty old signs.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 has unravelled plans to take his art to the United States, in many ways its spiritual home. “My work is very distinctive, which I like, but that has its downsides – people either love it or they hate it. It can make some people feel a bit uncomfortable.”

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