Trish Clark Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Phil Dadson since 2015, as a complement to From Scratch: 546 Moons presented at Te Uru, Titirangi, as part of Auckland Festival 2018.
Phil Dadson has been pushing the boundaries of sound and intermedia art in New Zealand since the 70s. His highly inventive trans-disciplinary approach to making art includes solo performances and exhibitions, building experimental musical instruments and sonic objects, video / sound installation, music composition, graphic scores, drawing, sound sculptures and improvisations with invented instruments. Video has been a constant passion for Dadson, as much for its ability to synergistically combine image and sound as for its unique physicality.
The central focus of Elemental, in counterpoint to From Scratch: 546 Moons at Te Uru, is Dadson’s activated approach to landscape. Presenting the film April Music, 2017 for the first time (Dadson’s long-duration performative work is a 12-year project during which, in sequential months each year, Dadson performs a daily practice of a visual score – adding to January Music, 2014, February Music, 2015, and March Music, 2016), the kinetic score of April Music’s daily filming delivers acute poetry of local landscapes both abstracted and emblematic. This kinetic approach to landscape is also expressed in two dimensions: three large-scale works, two produced during Dadson’s Headlands/Fulbright Fellowship in San Francisco in 2016, alongside several works arising from Dadson’s intensive exploration of Antarctica’s Dry Valley during his Antarctica Residency in 2003. Dadson’s 1992 film Resonance, originally conceived and presented for a performance at Kawasaki Museum, Japan in 1993, is re-mastered here in high definition and manifests Dadson’s long adherence to the exploratory and provisional impulse.
Appointed to the Sculpture Department at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1977, Dadson held the position of Head of Intermedia/Time-based arts from 1986 – 2001. Throughout his career Dadson has been the recipient of many key awards and fellowships, enabling numerous international residency, exhibition and festival opportunities, most recently the Fulbright-Wallace Arts Trust Award at Headlands, San Francisco, in 2016. In 2001 he received a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate award, in 2003 an Antarctic Artist Fellowship and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2005.
Trish Clark and the artist extend grateful thanks to Simon Ogston and Orlando Stewart for generously allowing the screening of Philip Dadson: Sonics From Scratch, 2015, premiered in the New Zealand International Film Festival 2016.
From Scratch: 546 Moons at Te Uru →
Auckland Arts Festival on From Scratch: 546 Moons →
Graham Reid review of From Scratch live performance on Elsewhere →
