It is easy to imagine an artist in their studio applying paint to a canvas, working with clay, chipping away at some stone, or drawing on paper pondering the next move, deep in concentration with only the sound of charcoal scraping the paper surface.
The reality resides in a much noisier and responsive space for these three artists.Integral to their work is the love of music. It is gestural and relational. It informs their thinking—conceptual, formal, material, and spatial concerns, it is manifest in the content. It is embodied in the outcome. Grant Takle, Richard Reddaway and Terry Urbahn met at art school, listened to music together, partied together, made art, and then went their separate ways; each continuing to make art with an inherent sense of what they had been a part of. Such a background infused with live music, art school bands, discos, clubs, turntables and mix tapes—the format varied but the sentiment remained the same, enabling rich terrain for these artists. The early 80s was a time whenFlying Nun was starting up, it felt like the underground music/art scene in Christchurch was coming up for air with the crossovers seen and heard with increasing conviction.This crossover is not uncommon to the art world, we saw it with Paul Klee, AndyWarhol and here, in Aotearoa New Zealand, Bill Hammond comes to mind.
A practicing musician himself, music has been a constant in Hammond’s career and he speaks of his paintings as being like instrumentals “laid out flat” replete with choruses and rhythms.1
Band of Three is a three-piece boy band reunion of a different kind. On the wall Takle’s painted vinyl records offer compositions visually and aurally. Urbahn has selected corresponding key tracks, reworked the elements to generate new soundtracks.
These are then transmitted through the speakers located within the sculptural objects constructed within the space by Reddaway. Each endearingly clumsy, slightly flat, misshapen, or out of tune but honest in its rendering- clinging to the wall and ambling into the space. These works retain the comical characteristics of the school dance,
the shy wall flower, the over-enthusiastic groupie, the awkward dancer, the lead and bass guitarists determining syncopation between notes, tones and words with the backing vocalist chipping in. The spangle from the Takle’s painted vinyl works operate as the percussion line, situated on the wall like symbols on a drum kit providing the intermittent tinkle.
Where has the punk gone? Perhaps it remains in the pressed vinyl grooves that are scratched and clogged with paint, the reconstructed use of cardboard with other materials, or the way in which the sound itself has been reworked and transmitted.
All punk is attitude. That’s what makes it. The attitude.2
The punk is here, though not discordant for there is a sense of the ungainly yet an overarching elegance unifying the discretely separate parts. These boys have grown up, now operating as mature male artists bringing together a well-practiced set, without the need for arduous rehearsals the punk rock edges are softened and resulting harmony ensues... rock on!
Gina Ferguson
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Grant Takle
I have been working with records on and off for over 25 years. To me, music and art act as a societal mirror of evolution and revolution creating reverberation and feedback. My interest focuses on the residual not only the information that is inherent in these “ARTIFACT” The records deny their designed “form and function” the substrate hold and withhold sound and its music silenced, but the potential remains. It is in this gap that the commerce of materials and idea generate new invention while playing with modernisms continual succession plan. These clusters of vinyl mandala have been infected with tombstone imagery in response to our society’s exposure to Covid 19.They are symptomatic memento mori reflecting the malignant communal spread of the virus and the saturation of social media sources. The hand painted Gravestone imagery, contaminate, these pressed and engraved platters of consumption. In this case these records are subjugated and act as support both physically and metaphorically functioning as reliquary, a store of acts, songs, lyrics, titles and subtexts. These containers of lives and histories are a graveyard of humanity’s emotional down loads, a viral product communally shared. Their individual voice and legacy subsumed into a larger entity a symbiotic organism growing in painted mass. Here the record is rescued re-animated and given new context a testament and monument of remembrance.
Born Christchurch, New Zealand, 1962
Diploma in Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1985
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Richard Reddaway
My father-in-law has given me his collection of jazz records and that makes me think music is a gift tied to the people who give it; I listen to Mike’s records and think of him, and him as a student in Dunedin in the 1960s with a passion for this cool, sophisticated artform. Just as I share Pavement with Catherine, K-Tel’s Greatest House Hits with George, Dione Warwick reminds me of Grant Lingard and Kate got me listening to the Mountain Goats. If music makes up my personal history, it’s also about this place: The Clean play “Point That Thing” at the Gladstone in 1981 and then again in 2014 at Chicks Hotel. We have our own rock’n’roll history in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I can’t put my finger on what makes it so specific, in the same way that I struggle to say what makes art from here particular. Perhaps one aspect of it can be heard in the lyrics, when Hamish sings “don’t point me out in a crowd” or Aldous Harding “I’ll never be in charge of anything...”. The oft-derided self-effacing quality of our social culture that along with the rising inflection at the end of our sentences expresses an aspiration to not put oneself above, but rather towards an equality with, others. I think music means these things to me because I’m not at all “musical”. But listening to music has always made me want to make art, to try to capture these elusive qualities in sculptural object(s) .
Born Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 1962
Diploma in Fine Arts with Honours in Sculpture, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1986MFA, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2000
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Terry Urbahn
Since the early 1990’s I have been quite deliberate in incorporating and referencing (through titles) sound and music in both my installation and video production artwork. This is borne out of my long-term interest in music, particularly rock, and performing in bands. My ambition was to somehow impart on the viewer/listener/audience the same sort of emotional/physical experiences I have had when witnessing really, really good live musical performances, that “hairs standing up on the back of your neck” feeling. Some of my installations have had an interactive element i.e. The Karaokes (1998) to further enhance audience immersion in the visual, aural, spatial experience. In creating the sound tracks I tend to delve into my own record collection, take samples, chop, paste, and mangle, sometimes to the point where the tune is hardly discernible but hinting at something you might have once heard. I don’t have a pre-set methodology, the process is random, intuitive and the music can become noise.
Born New Plymouth, New Zealand, 1961
BFA (Painting), University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1985
