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Old New Borrowed Blue
Tailored largely for younger audiences, Blue Planet is a gathering of works featuring the colour blue, and a rich introduction to different types of art-making. Spanning geography, history and philosophy, it brings together painting, photography and video, collage, ceramics and printmaking. Blue Planet also combines collection works, significant loans from private lenders and other public collections and works of art made especially for the show.
Helen Calder B48-102-250 (detail) 2010. Acrylic paint skin and stainless steel fittings. Collection of the artist. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Antoinette Godkin Gallery
Amongst these new works are Helen Calder's B48- 102-250 and B40-097-275 (both 2010), two shining hanging paint skins installed side-by-side, and testing their own weight across fine stainless steel rods. A local artist with a growing reputation for her ability to ask tantalising questions about paint behaviour and our expectations, Calder‘s latest paintings function without canvas or stretcher support. Evidently they are part of an ongoing, stripped back inquiry into the nature of painting-a reading that seems reinforced through Calder's selection of titles for her works. Being equally essential, their origin is in Resene paint chart colour codes: ‘The first digits denote the colour's luminance, with 0 being approximately black and 100 being approximately white. The second set of digits denotes the saturation or purity of the colour. The last set of digits tells you where the colour sits on a wheel of colour 0-360 degrees.' The rationality of this explanation belies the enigmatic nature of Calder's results.
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