Installation by Lander

Press, 6 April 1988, Page 43

Installation by Lander

review

“Installation” by Mark Lander at the CS.A. Gallery until April It. Reviewed by Pat Unger. Mark Lander is a landscapist with a difference. Instead of going about the Port Hills, capturing what he sees on canvas, he brings the branches of trees, clays and earthen materials down from their natural setting and lays them under his own personal canvases, which are sheets of homemade flax paper.

These amazing gauzethin papers are hung in rows above crossed sticks which frame the various soils and earthly things below. They have an inbuilt grace, moving and shifting as people pass, as if I they have a life and purpose of their own. As a tribute to fibre and land this installation effects feelings of poetic simplicity and sincerity. Hanging rows of material are nothing new. Julia Morison’s metaphysical word puzzle “God Dog” was on 48 sheets of tracing paper. The European artist Dieter Hacker’s hung canvases carried a hand-writ-ten declaration that began with “Art must claw to the neck of the bourgeois, as the lion does at the horse...” Although he uses a similar format, Lander’s

intention is quite different His message is an anthropological one. The natural colours of earth and clay and the simple markings of dashes and circles are more about mythological and enduring things.

The accompanying drawings are on a variety of papers, thickened and textured by different treatments of the everdurable flax, the colours, restricted to natural sources, have a richness that ranges from ecruwarm to the darkness of a Hotere intensity. The markings — dots, eyetooth patterns and curved lines — are consistent with the intentions of the artist and with the materials used. _

It is good to see that while the demi-gods of the New Zealand art world are endlessly feted, artists such as Mark Lander (and Linda James), are producing exhibitions of high quality by their own persistence and originality. The installation makes a visit to the C.S.A. a pleasure.