Kushana Bush: All Things to All Men
24 April, 2012 - 1 July, 2012
Drawing Room, Ballroom & Morning Room
Kushana Bush, The Mock Meeting (2011), Gouache and pencil on paper
A Hocken Collections touring exhibition
Exhibition opening Monday 23rd April, 6pm
‘To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made All things to all men, that I might by all means save some’. From the Bible, 1 Corinthians 9:22
Kushana Bush’s latest satirical paintings playfully tout the impossible task of satisfying everyone’s needs. Their delicate and alluring surfaces conflate disparate cultures, unsettle the simplified classifications of East and West and cut across cultural difference. Inhabited by a multi-cultural cast of characters, her amusing and imaginative group portraits draw on a range of art styles and epochs from Giotto’s fourteenth century frescoes and erotic Japanese Shunga art to Indo-Persian miniatures and the twentieth century paintings of Englishmen Stanley Spencer. Bush’s cosmopolitan art brings together constituent elements from all over the world in order to inventively reconfigure the geographical, political and social landscape of our time.
All of the delicate jewel-like gouaches in this exhibition were created during Bush’s year as the 2011 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. During the months prior to taking up the fellowship at the University of Otago, Bush made a pilgrimage to the Italian cities of Padua and Assisi to view Giotto’s biblical scenes. Since studying the paintings at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Bush’s art has taken a humanist turn. The characters in her group portraits convey the emotional power and simple, expressive gestures characteristic of the Florentine artist’s painting but not previously seen in Bush’s work.
Kushana Bush, Man Renouncing His Shirt (2011), Gouache and pencil on paper
In commonwith Giotto’s thirty-nine views of The Life of Christ and The Life of the Virgin Mary at the Scrovegni Chapel, Bush’s latest work demonstrates a strong narrative approach. However, rather than communicating specific messages, her baffling tableaux are open to a range of possible meanings. Interpretation is contingent on the viewer. This puzzlement, coupled with the fresh immediacy of the gouache medium, elicits a psychological proximity that beckons us to decipher the bizarre activities and emotional states of her inconspicuous folk.
The influence of Spencer’s paintings of ordinary people participating in daily life in the village of Cookham can be seen in Bush’s gouaches of individuals bathing, arranging flowers and worshiping or lover’s engaged in trysts. Often captured in deliberately awkward or sexually explicit poses, Bush’s characters gather for a mock meeting, flock to worship cultural artifacts, rally for an unknown cause or participate in bizarre encounters. For instance a crowd of Lucie Rie enthusiasts erupting in awe over the ceramic forms of the British potter, a gang of women in identical work wear constructing a tower from empty cardboard cartons and a group of cavorting men with rolled newspapers absorbed in a strange ritual.
Bush’s visionary group portraits are rich mosaics of cultural expression that reveal a wealth of human sensibilities and spiritualties. Her cast of ethnically diverse people, who show believable emotions including pathos and joy, communicate the importance of social inclusiveness, community and human companionship in a global society currently exemplified by social inequality, political unrest and economic migration. Bush’s utopian gouaches put forward a world where difference is embraced and the possibilities for co-existence are limited only by the scope of one’s imagination.
