The Persuasion of the Real
Michael Dunn 1995

The domestic world conjured up by Sylvia Siddell is one where still-life objects take on a pulsating energy full of movement and unease. Everyday implements such as a bread knife, become threatening images of death or mutilation. Siddell's domestic world seems restive and subversive of accepted values. The scale and colour of her still-life objects depart from normal expectations and enter into a realm of psychological malaise where the normal order is overthrown. It is easy to trace a feminist agenda in Sylvia Siddell's paintings that looks inward to the traditional arenas of women's work such as the kitchen, with feelings of anguish and repulsion rather than contentment. But whether she would paint any differently no matter what the subject-matter, is conjectural, for her reality is one in which the imaginative dimension would always be to the fore and movement very much part of her visual dynamic.

Contemporary Painting in New Zealand

Staging the Real

To some degree all visual art is imitation. Through a series of decisions an artist chooses to depict or reproduce an idea. In the case of the works in the present exhibition this process is achieved with varying degrees of pretence at reality. What we view is often the replication of something that never did exist, and often could not have. These artists are involved in staging the real.
As viewers we are subject to the artist's choice of what is real. We accept as realistic this presentation as we view the image. The framing of an image is usually overlooked and it is only through questioning that we begin to wonder on the selection. Visual simulation of realism is as much about what is left out of the image as what is left in.
New Zealand has a history of artists working with differing realisms for visual ends. For example, works by C.R Goldie, A.H. O'Keefe, W.A. Sutton, Rita Angus, Michael Smither, and Don Binney can all been termed 'realist', although, more could be written about the differences between these artists than their similarity. In New Zealand there is no coherent sense of a 'movement' of 'Realists'. In fact, application of this term is inappropriate as it refers to a specific social and political moment in time. In the present survey exhibition New Zealand artists are shown to explore varied uses of realism. We encounter artists questioning the real, and exposing a subjective realism founded on memory, association and invention. Neither representation nor appearance are simple or static in these works. The visual image appears before us as the transcription of experience.
Contemporary New Zealand artists are using the real to explore representation, which in today's climate is a political act. Uses of the real determine at their broadest that the image is representational rather than abstract. The artist's intention is to depict reality conceptually. The act of depiction renders three dimensional the sculptural and pictorial space. Although , as the saying goes, the map is not the territory, these maps can be seen to reflect some of the realities of the territory.
The domestic kitchen is the subject of Sylvia Siddell's Divided in which a sliced pumpkin bleeds pips. Siddell references the violent actions of a kitchen in the style of a European vanitas painting. The threat and inevitability of time passing and the speed at which life can be altered, (with the cut of a knife) are both addressed. This is not a purely negative viewpoint, for it is with this preparation that food becomes desirable. The passing of time looks toward a re-birth of some form.

Susan Ballard