Duo and a sculptor

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34089, 28 February 1976, Page 21

Duo and a sculptor

In the first Brooke (Gifford exhibition for ,1976. entitled “Three Standard Devialions,” the inseparable painting duo, Stephanie Sheehan and Joanne Hardy, is accompanied by a sculptor, William Collison.

For Sheehan and Hardy it is their third show together in the last seven months, for Collison his first. We have had opportunity enough to become familiar with the painters’ shared style of intensely coloured acrylic, paint thinly applied upon canvas in firmly defined forms, and their chosen! imagery which draws heavily on those of pop-art and its commercially derived graphic design forms. Their images, here stridently feminist, there from an esoteric private world, are, in this exhibition, wryly observed and cuttingly critical. Hardy, the younger of the two, is more consistently! able than Sheehan, who;

nonetheless can. and from time to time does rise to the occasion. Hardy's forms are intrinsically decorative. iAt time exclusively so as

i may be seen in the pile of arabesques from “Circus”. At other times they are merely the fluff and foam upon I a rather more substantial base. Decorat ton and significance are not inextricably linked, the one can and does exist without the other but when resolved into a unified whole Hardy is able to call forth images of strength, albeit a modish strength. So her “Gift Wrapped” is a knife thrust! into the tatter and tinsel of bourgeois life. “Rent”, where a man and woman lie recumbent upon the verandah of a fragmented Victorian house in a thicket of grass! and plants, is at once both a poetic expose of derelict New Zealand rental housing, and, with a wedge of blue driven betweeen the figures unrelieved save for a sunflower, a metaphor of the ultimate mystery separating the sexes. Sheehan, by contrast., tends towards the crassly | obvious in "Executive Posi-( tion” and “Of Shoes”, or the guts and noise of “Offal and Stardust”. Nowhere is there a painting of the resolution found in “Audience" exhibited last July, its news'

photo composition translated into paint with conviction and command “Men in Grev Raincoats” and “The Force i that” most nearly approach that height. In their last exhibition these two women chose an interesting male with whom to exhibit — and they have (done so again. Collison announces himself with gusto as one mounts the stairs. A trumpet fanfare activated by the visitor greets him. A wall mounted amplifier tape unit, its workings superbly engineered, is turned inside out, its programmed responses indicated by a minute panel of flashing light. The ! power unit and the speakers, like two other pieces employing flashing bulbs mounted in brass upon wood, are manufactured with precision and craftsmanship, and not without humour. In his reverse binnocular spectacles, the lenses are , like some owlish eyes, the sensation when worn being (one of Gulliverian height. From Hardy s and Sher han's grandiloquence it is refreshing to turn to Collison's taciturn works. The exhibition wilt close on March 5 1 —T. L. Rodnej Wilson.