The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Neil Dawson was born in 1948 in Christchurch, New Zealand. After training initially at the University of Canterbury, in 1972-73he furthered his studies in sculpture at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne. For eight years he taught three-dimensional studies and drawing at Christchurch Polytechnic. Nowadays he works full-time, assisted by Bruce Edgar, from his Christchurch studio. Neil Dawson has held over thirty solo exhibitions since the early 1970s in New Zealand and several in Australia, most recently at Luba Bilu Gallery, Melbourne in 1992. It is, however, the artist's installations and public commissions which have earned him a considerable international profile. These include Vanity in the '7th Biennale of Sydney', Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1988 and Globe in 'Magiciens de la terre' at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989. Snap was Dawson's aerial sculpture instal­ lation commissioned for the 1992 Adelaide Festival. Precedents for Snap and Canopy (1993) go back some ten years to Dawson's linear description of a simple gable-ended building floating in space above the quadrangle of the Christchurch Arts Centre. In planning Echo NEW ZEALAND NEIL DAWSON Top and bottom Montage for Canopy 1993 Site-specific sculpture suspended above the forecourt of Queensland Art Gallery (1981) he was concerned to construct a work that would change the perception of the space, but not alter it physically. As the viewer entered the quadrangle, Echo perspectively formed an image - an echo - of the Arts Centre itself. However, from other vantage points, the image was deconstructed into various shifting perspectives and finally dissolved into a chaos of lines. Questions about visual reality were inevitably provoked through this elusive object - a drawing in space continually revising itself. Other well-known commissions Dawson has undertaken in New Zealand are The rock, outside Wellington's BNZ Centre, and Ripples, temporarily sited amongst the trees on the river bank outside TeWhare Taonga o Waikato in Hamilton. Get the picture, a vast postcard image on the Wellington Railway Station facade, and Framework were tem­ porary installations for a major sur vey exhibition of his site works 1981-89, staged by theNational Art Gallery (now theMuseum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa). All of these statements delighted in a sense of 'double take' as they hovered out of reach, confounding and seducing through their wit and illusion. Neil Dawson's most ambitious public 90 sculpture to date, the 4.5 metre Globe, situated above the plaza outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris during 1989, was not the predictable cartographer's globe but a delicate ephemeral planet of cloud and pressure systems derived from satellite photographs. It raised questions about the vulnerability of the ecosystem. The work intrigued and engaged people, speaking very directly to thousands of Parisians and international visitors. The sculpture had to succeed not only visually, but needed also to withstand the possibility of inclement weather. In the achievement of what often appear to be extremely simple ideas executed with great economy, there is a sophistication of concept and the employment of high performance materials and innovative engineering in all of the artist's large-scale projects erected outdoors. In Canopy, Neil Dawson has produced a delicate line drawing (on a monumental scale) suspended in a horizontal plane approximately tenmetres above the forecourt of the Queensland Art Gallery. From a distance, Canopy is a hovering, arresting presence on the South Bank of the Brisbane River. T he title refers to an historical architectural form - a vault or arch - as much as it does to the envelopment of an expanse of sk y. As with Echo much earlier, the artist has explored perspectival drawing conventions against a natural background. The construction with its foreshortening, inversions and distortions alters its character dramatically as the viewer shifts position and as the heavens constantly change. Anne Kirker