Rohan Wealleans Tatunka left: For the Spirit of the Forest. centre: Blood Crystal Catcher right: Red Spirit Snare. 2006. Paint, wood, steel, fishing buoys, ceramic beads, baby rattles, string and rope. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – Red Spirit Snare. 2006. Paint, wood, steel, fishing buoys, ceramic beads, baby rattles, string and rope. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka 2006. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka 2006. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – left: Tingler 2006. Collection of the James Wallace Arts Trust. right: Disciple of the Pearl 2006. Collection Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Paint, polystyrene, fibreglass and steel. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – Disciple of the Pearl 2006 (detail). Collection Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Paint, polystyrene, fibreglass and steel. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – left: The Big Blue 2006. Paint, polystyrene, fibreglass on wood. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – left: The Big Blue 2006 (details). Paint, polystyrene, fibreglass on wood. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – Ritual Painting 2006. Paint and plastic bags on wall. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans Tatunka – Ritual Painting 2006 (detaila). Paint and plastic bags on wall. Courtesy of the artist.
Rohan Wealleans
Tatunka
27 May 2006 - 6 August 2006
Rohan Wealleans is already well known to Dunedin gallery-goers for his exhibitions The Fluoro Rider and In the Shadow of the Beast at local galleries in 2005.
Occupying the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's largest gallery space, Tatunka is the major outcome of this painter's year as Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago. Including two enormous freestanding dream catchers' and a vast, hanging, sci-fi cocoon, Wealleans' new works are at once colossal and intricate, gruesome and beautiful.
___________
THE ART OF ROHAN WEALLEANS
He's the kind of artist who ignites arguments, even in audiences of one. Whenever I encounter a new batch of paintings by Rohan Wealleans, at least three of my inner viewers rush in with conflicting responses. One of them just wants to gawk gratefully at some of the strangest objects you'll see on New Zealand gallery walls. Another wants to separate the bluff from the provocation in the artist's overheated imagery. And the last viewer wants to argue with the first two, for jumping so predictably to take the artist's carefully laid bait.
To find yourself divided in this way is an unsettling but welcome pleasure. Too many artworks right now expect to be met by viewers who are just ghosts of the artist: same assumptions, same opinions, no chance of an argument. But on the evidence of his brazen and brilliant paintings, Wealleans could think of nothing worse than to be liked in this blandly approving way - to have someone look at his paintings, nod in agreement, and shuffle on. His paintings want to stick their big bulges in, to seduce and repulse in the same instant. They want to remind us of our capacity to disagree, with ourselves no less than each other.
It's not just their daunting scale that makes the paintings succeed so extravagantly in that task. Nor just their dizzying levels of detail. It's the way each new work at once widens the scope of Wealleans' attack and raises the stakes for what's to come. Forms break open into other forms. Bits cut from one work become the foundation of others. Horror and wonder jostle for precedence. And through all this, the artist dives from one persona to the next without sacrificing any of his formidable momentum. Rather than approaching one artist called Rohan Wealleans, it feels like we're being bullrushed from all sides by a whole array of them.
[Justin Paton — Introduction text from Rohan Wealleans: Let's make the fire turn green. Published 2007 by Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena and Dunedin Public Art Gallery]