The Dowse

On the second sunny day we had after a week of snow, sleet, rain, clouds and freezing temperatures, I was ready for an encounter with light and air.  We had planned a birthday celebration lunch at a great place on Cuba Street called  Plum for the last day of Wellington on a Plate and we were not disappointed by tasty seared Nelson scallops and lovely wild salmon, and afterward my request was that we check out The Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt, which I had heard usually had good shows, and then to go for a walk along the Hutt River Trail.   

Fortunately, we were able to encounter light and air even during our museum visit, as it turned out to be such a great place and the current exhibitions so good, that we ended up spending more than two and a half hours there.  I was so impressed by one show in particular, called Crystal City: Contemporary Asian Artists, that I thought I'd share some of the ways that we experienced it. 

Among many favorites was one I first stumbled into without reading the curation note on the wall.  I pushed through a heavy black velvet curtain and found myself in a completely dark room.  I waved my arms around, hoping to perhaps trigger a motion-sensor-driven installation, but nothing happened.  I felt for a switch on the wall . . . .nothing.  I noticed that across the space there was what appeared to be another black curtain, with a tiny shaft of light shining at its edge.  I felt my way across the room, kicking my feet out in front of me in case of anything on the floor, and made it to the other side and out.  Once there, while looking for light switches on the outside of the doorway, I finally noticed the following. 

Ah, the dark room is explained!

Strangely enough, I had just run upstairs realizing that I had left our camera sitting on the couch where I'd been watching Ari construct a marble run with another little boy, as if I'd somehow known it would be important for the exhibit.  Or maybe not -- I have just had more than one close call with the camera, including leaving it on a ferry boat in Sydney Harbor and having to run across town to meet the ferry at its next stop - a story I'll save for some other time.  So I re-entered the dark room and starting pointing and shooting away at the black walls.  This is what I saw in the split-second light flares from the camera's flash.  Already I knew that my interaction with the exhibit was going to involve another dimension -- viewing the content of the photographs at home on my computer.  Unlike the artist, I of course had some idea of what I was shooting, as at least the brief flashes and the camera's "immediate playback" function gave me a quick glimpse of what was in front of me. 

Soon enough Ari and Evan came downstairs to the exhibit, and I was able to share the experience with Ari.  Now we had another dimension.  "Blind" eyes seeing unknown objects, plus a moving, interactive spectator.  Ari posed in many different spaces in the room, so we then had a series of photos of Ari with the artwork.  His final pose shows him imitating the artist.  In front of the things being photographed, but unable to see them at all. 

Another room in the exhibit showed a video by artist Hye Rim Lee, a swirling dance of glass pieces euphemistically described as "fantasy toys" (dildos I believe?) in front of which a dragon and a Barbie-like figure interact while being occasionally interrupted by a bunny-shaped pacifier.  City of dildos?  Couple being interrupted by something related to baby?  Hmm.

Here is Ari investigating another Pak Sheung Chuen work in which various sayings are printed on a gallery's walls.  Among other suggestions are to "use your body to measure the city" or this one "listen to other people's dialogue on the street and copy it down meticulously."  A couple of the suggestions are illustrated by other works in the show, including one about collecting all of your breaths in plastic bags. 

In a speeded up video, we see the artist filling an apartment with bags of his exhaled breath.  By the end, he has filled every space.  This video, as well as the instruction to "find the air from different countries while shopping in a supermarket" or something similar, got me thinking about the idea of air from one country being experienced when opening a container from that place - is there Japanese air inside a tightly sealed package of udon noodles?  Does India come out of the foil pouch of Dal Makani? 

I guess it's time for a digression about our connections with the world via the air we breathe.  Here's an excerpt (from the Barnes & Noble website) of a passage from David Suzuki's book You Are the Earth: Know Your World So You Can Help Make It Better

You’re Breathing Dinosaur Breath.

Did you know that the next breath you take will contain dinosaur breath? It sounds weird, but it’s true. Here’s how it works. Air is really a mixture of several gases. A gas is a light, invisible substance that floats freely in the air—steam, for example. Two of these gases, nitrogen and oxygen, make up almost all of the air.
There is only a small amount of the gas argon in the air. Yet each breath you breathe out, or exhale, contains about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 (you can call that 30 zillion) atoms of argon. In a few minutes, the atoms you’ve exhaled in that one breath will travel right through your neighborhood. In a year, they will have spread all around the Earth, and about 15 of them will be right back where they started—in your nose.
Argon is always in you and around you. And not just in you but also in your best friend, your favorite pop star, the birds, snakes, flowers, trees, and worms. All of us air breathers are sharing in that same “pool” of argon atoms.So here’s where the dinosaurs come in. An interesting thing about argon atoms is that they never change or die—they stay around forever. That means that thousands of years ago, an Egyptian slave building the pyramids breathed some of the same argon atoms that later Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and Napoleon’s horse breathed. And some of those were argon atoms exhaled by dinosaurs that lived 70 million years ago. They all breathed out argon atoms into the air—ready for you to breathe in as you read this sentence. And when you exhale your next 30 zillion argon atoms, some of them will one day find their way into the noses of babies not yet born.
What’s true of argon is true of air in general. Air joins together all of Earth’s creatures—past, present, and future.

How about that? OK, so back to the Dowse. 

After we'd explored more of Pak Sheung Chuen's ideas, including photographs illustrating the poetic instruction we'd seen earlier printed on the wall to "find a building you like.  stay up watching it as long as it takes until everyone in the building goes to sleep," we moved on to a funny video by Cheng Ta Yu from Taiwan, in which he filmed actors around various well known locations in Wellington, only at midnight, reading free online translations of entries about the city in guidebooks written in English and Mandarin.  The text of the translations are also shown in Mandarin and English on screen, as appropriate, and in both languages, the final product is often wildly inaccurate and extremely humorous. It's a great way to comment on the problems of  communicating across cultures, especially as the tour itself is highly subjective, showing us only particular vantage points in particularly dim circumstances, despite the bright lighting used for the midnight video clips.

Following the theme of How We See Things, Ari then took the camera and photographed the exhibit his way.  I included a few of his shots, because it's interesting to me to see the difference in the way art looks if it is essentially above your normal viewing height.

A tree filled with wooden wind chimes that had been decorated by museum-goers at a gallery in Wellington (a related show) and then brought to the Dowse was just over my head, but didn't leave me space to get under the tree.


For Ari, it was high enough that he could walk under the tree and see the wind chimes from the bottom, which was actually more in line with the exhibit we had seen when we walked in of a courtyard of painted wooden windchimes all blowing about above our heads. 

Ari also captured the work of Jin Jiangbo whose work explored the relationship of contemporary digital technology to traditional Chinese custom.  In one piece, video images on a screen that looked like a traditional painting scroll moved in response to the viewer's playing on the Guqin, a traditional instrument. In this series of photos, Ari also manages to insert himself as artist, with his shadow image on the screen in the last shot.

Almost all of the works were worth second viewings, and we spent more time with most of them.  In fact, we returned to the Dowse 2 weeks later on a Thursday night to eat pizza, listen to music and continue exploring the galleries.  Ari, who had been distracted earlier in a show designed for kids about color, paid more attention to it and seemed to enjoy a second viewing (this show immediately brought to mind a really great show we had seen last year at the Whanganui Regional Museum about Color. See here for a piece about it that is an award from a paint manufacturer!)   A new exhibit called "Knitted and Knotted" was up when we returned and we enjoyed seeing traditional handcraft techniques – crochet, weaving, knitting and knotting – incorporated into artworks in surprising new ways.  We will definitely be heading back to the Dowse this coming year. 

Snow in Wellington. This Isn't Supposed to Happen Here!

I'm particularly liking the ambulance guys eating their breakfast.

So Kiwi!

click on this link for the photo: Weta Cave Is Commissioned to do rugby statue - unveiled for World Cup

Of course, it was dedicated by a bunch of guys doing a Haka in cold, winter weather.

Happy Happy

Where Have You Been?

Not that anyone is asking.

January, February, March, April, now it's May.  Somehow, months and months have gone by the wayside.  The longer things go unsaid, the harder they are to say -- where to begin?  Although I have had quite a number of "Oh, I need to write about that" moments, and the opening lines of many many a post have percolated around in my head, there has always been something that has gotten in the way of my sitting down and actually writing the thing.  I've got some boring what-the-hell-has-happened-over-the-past-few-months stuff I need to get out in order to move on, but before I do that, I'll try to resurrect a couple/few of the things I should have written about. 

1.  Kiwi Hospitality.  I assume it's because we're living in Wellington, a busy, cosmopolitan-ish, sophisticated, home of the political and all that goes along with that, but after we moved here, we found that we were never really on the receiving end of any of that Kiwi openness and hospitality this country is so famous for.  People are nice, for sure, but people we met on buses were not inviting us home for dinner and no one handed us the keys to their bach, or gave us their old bicycles to ride, or told us we had to go and stay with their relatives when we were in Carterton, Whanganui, Waikanae, Motueka, Central Otago, wherever, next weekend.  We didn't really think the friendly Kiwi thing was a fiction, but we certainly didn't expect it anywhere, based on our first 6 months here.  Then we went to the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days with friends from the U.S. who were visiting.  And we had a giant plate of fresh fish handed to us through the window!  Finally!  The friendly neighbor of the bach where we were staying was a classic guidebook Kiwi.  The morning after we arrived he headed over, in his shorts and gumboots, across his yard toward our kitchen window as we were making breakfast.  In his hand he carried a plate heaping with beautiful fresh-caught snapper fillets, which he handed us with good cheer.  After a nice chat (and many exclamations of thanks on our part), he headed home, only to return later to offer us use of his washing machine should we need to do any laundry during our stay.  Wow. 

I should add that a couple of days ago, as I was heading out of Zealandia, a fabulous bird sanctuary a short walk from our house, a woman leaving the parking lot in her car slowed down, rolled down her window and asked me if I wanted a ride anywhere.  Since I only live a 5 minute walk away, I said no thanks, I just live up the hill, but I was pleasantly surprised to see this type of generous behaviour to strangers happening here in Wellington.  Who knows, perhaps it is only extended to tourists (Zealandia is definitely on the tourist circuit)?  We are in some weird category between tourist and local.  Lots of Wellington people are from somewhere else (in NZ) and are here because of school or work.  So there's less of that sense of small-town NZ here. 

2.  Paper Napkins.  Apparently there is a training course that any eating establishment in New Zealand must take before getting licensed for business.  There is only one module in the course -- paper napkins.  There are two rules for napkins here.  One, they must be as small and cheap as possible.  Two, they must be rolled around the silverware and "glued" together by moistening the point of the folded napkin in water (or paste?) and sticking it to the roll.  This guarantees that you will shred some portion of your napkin into bits as you try to get it unstuck from itself and unrolled from your fork and knife.  This rule holds true whatever the class of restaurant.  Evan and I were surprised (appalled, actually), to have tiny cheap paper napkins at a meal in a very upscale restaurant where the bill was north of $200.  We don't really understand it.  I have decided that this training course, and the whole "napkin conspiracy" is funded by Persil, or maybe some consortium of laundry detergent manufacturers.  One's clothes are much more at risk of being either used as napkins, due to aforesaid shredding, or being the target of an errant bit of food dropping into the lap, as the napkins are not actually large enough to cover both legs of a seated adult.  In a cafe or coffeeshop, there are never containers of napkins sitting about in case you need an extra one.  And if you go up to the counter to ask for one, they'll make a big production of finding you one - there is always a big stack of the pre-rolled napkin/silverware rolls, but never any solo napkins.  So, we have mostly learned to live with it and had stopped thinking about it so much until we went to Auckland, where Evan read an article in Auckland Magazine about the best restaurants in Auckland.  The reviewer was doing some generalizations about the places, both good and bad points, and he made an issue of pointing out that several of these high-end restaurants were still working in this paper napkin scheme.  WHAT'S WITH THAT?  the review basically scolded.  I finally brought it up with a Kiwi friend.  She and her husband had just had the same experience we did at the expensive Wellington restaurant and had remarked on it.  So it seems that at least some Kiwi diners know that a tiny paper napkin doesn't belong with a $200 dinner.  SO WHAT'S WITH IT?  I really want to know.

Contemplating a Different Site

I have some new volunteering gigs, which is really nice.  At one I am helping people who live in Wellington City Council housing to use computers.  More on that later, but as a part of that work, I am looking at all the various resources that are shown to the residents to help them get online and make the most of it.  One is a website called Weebly that  helps you make your own website.  It's really simple to use and since it's a website that includes a blog page, you can have more than one page going.  I named mine "Tiny Blue Hippo" which at the moment I am feeling very partial to.  It's too much work to maintain two blogs of course, so I may have to move over there or change the name of this thing to Tiny Blue Hippo.  I'd like to figure out how to better link to news stories than I do here (well, I don't here).  I do it on Facebook but haven't figured it out in blogland.  Maybe that will be Wednesday's learning experience at the computer hub.