Glen Hayward
About the work
I have few things to offer textually. I fight it; it is either too direct or too evocative and I can’t tell. And now we suffer under the weight of the short verse of digitality and advertising. The available sources of solace have been diminished by the terrible quality of words and images and I don’t wish to add to it. But here we are, directed, produced by language, we need more moments of silence. So an apologetic tone to get us started.
I remember the thrill as a child of putting my fifty cents pocket money on the grass and enacting the experience of finding fifty cents. As a theoretical grown up I remember putting a two dollar coin in the pokie machine and pressing the return button to get my money back; enacting the circuit of winning. In between times I remember reading about little Hans and the fort/da game. Speaking of Dada, this morning I remember thinking about the way Duchamp attempts to visualise the lack of a sexual relation using a Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors…even. That maybe identity is more usefully described as different structural relationships to fantasy and castration.
I begin, halfway through, with wonder, I wonder if crushed bottle caps are still around, I collected them twenty years ago to make sculptures about, but had ceased noticing them, I begin looking for them and am once again awash from my drifts with the piles collected. They are still around, things are not as different as time would make me believe. I walk I once again am primed to find, I find. Every finding is a re-finding. Corona is the name of a Japanese car, a beer, in this case an extra beer, a crown beloved of Basquiat and something to do with glans penis. How do we loosen signifiers and quilt them at a more productive place? As just demonstrated, Wikipedia won’t help, knowledge is not power. The work knows more about me than I do and this insight ought disempower me.
About the artist
Recent solo shows include: Wish You Were Here, City Gallery, Wellington (2022); One day, today, PAULNACHE (2019); As if, PAULNACHE (2018); Dendrochronology, Tauranga Art Gallery, The Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, OBJECTSPACE, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2018); Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks (2017); SPRING1883, The Windsor Hotel (2016); I don’t want you to worry about me I have met some Beautiful People, City Gallery Wellington and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu (2013); Mirrorworld, McCahon house open studio, Auckland Arts Festival (2011).
Group shows include: Contour 556 Public art and architecture Biennale, Canberra (2018); A Working Model of the World, Sheila C Johnson Design Centre, Parsons, The New School, New York, (2017); The Obstinate object, curators Aaron Lister and Abbey Cunnae, City Gallery, Wellington (2012); Debuilding, curator Justin Paton, Christchurch City Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch (2011); Call Waiting, curator Alexa Johnston, Auckland City Art Gallery (NEW), Auckland (2010); Reboot, The Jim and Mary Barr Collection, curator Justin Paton, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery and Wellington City Gallery (2006-2007).
