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Wednesday, July 3, 2002
PRESS RELEASE
From Holland
Warren Olds & Douglas Kelaher
The installation practices of Warren Olds and Douglas Kelaher are obsessively influenced by their work as designers. The three-dimensional design of Kelahers furniture has informed much of his sculptural installation work since his 1998 graduation show, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, at The Honeymoon Suite. Recent shows, Waiting Room at High Street Project and T.A.B for Oblique's Kiosk in Christchurch have introduced modular motifs and extended a fascination with highly designed futuristic film sets. Olds' graphic design is primarily two-dimensional and print focussed but his installation projects transform and customise this practice for gallery contexts. A recent collaborative show, Member's Aspect with Shay Launder, in Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Rear Window and a solo show, dot.com.AOK for RAMP Gallery, have sought to apply some of the language and technical processes of graphic design on to objects, and into spaces.
From Holland is a collaborative installation project by Warren Olds and Douglas Kelaher for The Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin.
From Holland extends earlier individual projects by each artist. Extending obsessions with futuristic objects and environments, it incorporates a set of plywood luggage from Battlestar Galactica, chill-out room lighting, and large-scale work painted directly on the gallery wall.
Warren Olds: "I like how the show doesn't just look like Doug's work on that side of the room, and my work on the other. It's a collaboration in the spirit of the word – there are connections with our individual practices but overall it looks like one work."
Douglas Kelaher: "From Holland was a great time. We installed a transit lounge with luggage for the international artist about to go intergalactic. Warren shared his secrets with me in the fine art of wall painting. We got the hardest edge on that wall painting and the hard edge united with the luggage to create an installation that would make a sci-fi geek proud."
While the exhibitions title throws up a number of mediated associations with Holland, or the Netherlands – it is perhaps the eclecticism of dutch design culture, plywood understanding of materials and remote geography that is most prevalent in this installation project.
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Art New Zealand
No. 104 / Spring 2002
[excerpt]
DUNEDIN
Warren Olds and Douglas Kelaher collaborated to make From Holland at the Blue Oyster Gallery and created such a work. Digital, but not, designed but not, crated but not unpacked, applied, explored, and as a result the installation allowed viewers to make their own meaning from amidst its surfaces.
The best collaborative work has a both/ and feel, becoming an exhibition that could not have been made by either party but is fully realised and logical when both working styles are put together. Olds and Kelaher achieve this whilst also enticing us into their unique world of unfinish.
Aesthetics is not a straitjacket here, but a goal, something to be played with and traversed in the creation of superfluous design objects. Both Olds and Kelaher are well known for their design practices. This environment certainly would never make it into a 'freedom' furniture catalogue, but somehow should. The title From Holland is a play on this design sensibility, a clean line, drawn from here to there, from one small remote country to another.
From Holland consisted of a large wall painting, an assortment of travel crates, and cool 'chill-out' lighting. The wall space was recalibrated, becoming physically present as luscious thick paint wrapped its way across difficult corners, sucking itself into concave spaces and then finally exploding into a gigantic liquid architecture. Scattered before it packing cases sat waiting to be thrust upon a giant conveyor belt, x-rayed and propelled out into space. Plywood is cut, screwed and boxed, the cases themselves recognised for their objecthood. The exhibition has arrived, cut loose from its social, historical and aesthetic moorings; it has travelled, beginning a journey that it will never finish.
– Susan Ballard
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