Guy, whose practice is interested in the legacy of mid-century modernism, was drawn to this moment of misrecognition as a sign of modernism’s enduring influence within architectural design. The Staircase paraphrases this handrail design again as a sculptural object, a peculiar armature that calls up Scarpa’s spectre to Waiheke, where many examples of faux modernist residencies can be found, perhaps bearing his influence without knowing it.
Free-standing metal sculptures and stained glass
assemblages echo the bright opacity of writer and artist Joanna Margaret Paul’s stations of the cross at St Mary’s Star of the Sea in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. They define shape and space
while incorporating negative (white) space, and translucency. Like Paul’s
typography they intend to elude direct reading by simultaneously referencing
and defamiliarizing the subject.
Using the bronze door handle from Notre-Dame du Haut as its source—La Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France—The Weight of the Door presents a series of objects that the artist describes as translations. This fragment of the chapel structure, isolated, removed its vitrine surround.The bronze form appears here as a series of distortions. Horizontal and vertical iterations of varying lengths and proportions that differ from the source. A series of bronzes presented not on plinths but directly on the gallery’s concrete floor, dispersed.