Categories
Subjects
Authors
Artists
Venues
Locations
Calendar
Filter
Done
September 17, 2014 – Review
“I Like Girls”
Megan Dunn
“I like Girls” is a stockroom show loosely organized around a statement that irreverently alludes to feminism, which combines Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard) (1985) with a range of works by New Zealand artists Ava Seymour and Yvonne Todd. At the last minute a Sherrie Levine image from the “After Degas” series (1987) was dropped from the final group selection. Whether this exclusion was a shortcoming of Levine’s or Degas’s is impossible to know. Levine’s absence leaves the connections between the three female artists looking a little cosmetic, which is not necessarily a bad thing: after all, visual art can still afford to look good.
This is the second show at this temporary, quasi-industrial venue, a big change for a gallery that for over 45 years occupied two small rooms above Wellington’s bohemian Cuba Street, a modest site that has become a central part of its mythology. Peter McLeavey’s iconic reputation was built during the 1950s and 1960s, when he helped forge the national art market, exhibiting the country’s first significant modernists, including Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters. But this historical legacy has presented challenges for his daughter, Olivia McLeavey, at the helm of …