Interior Life

20 October - 21 December 2007

Interior Life, Andrew McLeod, 2007

Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007 Andrew McLeod, Interior Life, 2007

Alongside the exhibition Pulp Fictions: The Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, leading Auckland-based artist Andrew McLeod carried out a temporary room-sized wall drawing in the Adam Art Gallery’s Kirk Gallery.

Interior Life combined the meticulous precision of architectural rendering with a state of heightened imagination, creating a strange and tantalising world that was at once familiar and recognisable, and yet confounding and bizarre. McLeod’s practice includes painting, artist books, and a seemingly limitless number of drawings that are each filled with a maze of imagery and text; architectural plans and models collide with imagery from children’s books, natural history illustrations, and a clutter of symbols and motifs from his rich local culture.

Interior Life exploited the black walls of the Adam Art Gallery as ground for a temporary room-sized wall drawing. Thin white lines carefully delineated a domestic interior that hovered over a background of black space. This interior has been occupied, invaded by a tangled collection of symbols and signs, animals, trails of text and manifestations from the natural world that bloom incongruously in corners. It was as if the borders separating inside and outside had started to leak, become porous, producing a space that was both an architectural interior and a human interior life, with its accumulated jetsam of desires, fears and imaginings.

 

Interior Life was accompanied by an artist book documenting the installation. Published by the Adam Art Gallery with contributions by Frances Loeffler and David Cauchi. Available for purchase here