'Small Works'
Front Gallery, 15th October–2nd November 2008
Callum Arnold presents a new body of work that draws from New Zealand landscape traditions in which he confront the spectator with the conventions of this familiar iconography while also seeking to reconstruct and celebrate anew, our experience of such aesthetics. Small Works acknowledges the painting conventions of nineteenth century artists such as John Gibb and Alfred Walsh, and renders the landscape of the South Island from multiple roadsides, vehicles and campervans.
Callum dissects and reconstructs the single-point perspective of the modern-day traveller as a shifting and unending experience through time and space. Small Works illuminates a world from the roadsides of New Zealand that appears fragmented and temporary, yet remains anchored in multiple perspectives and divergent pathways that are resolved by the artist in a series of beautiful formalist images. Arnold is currently artist-in-resident at Rangi Ruru High School.