The exhibition @home by Wellesley Binding displays a playful rhetoric that dissects many concepts about corporatisation and globalisation, and overlays these against an obviously New Zealand sub-urban context. The resulting imagery with all its tensions is akin to a ‘corporate circus’. It is this notion that underpins the work in this exhibition.

There is no colour in these paintings. The black and white scale that describes the night-time scenes, assists with the generic and brand like quality of the paintings. It is as if in answer to his own inquiry, and consistent with his narrative agenda, Binding has genericised his paintings and made them devoid of the emotive power of colour. Description comes from within the cool and distanced use of black and white, and each painting assists with the strong narrative thread that connects them all together.

This is the fatuous and closeted world of the corporate takeover, but it is also a curious world of the businessman as cult member or generic figure in a larger (sinister) scheme.

“I live in a leafy provincial suburb, part dreamy utopia, part nightmare. Last summer I walked it at night. At night, the utopian life-forms dissolve and the other comes forth under scarcely adequate street lighting, confusing the favoured New Zealand landscape formality (‘frontal’ toy houses, comfortable armchair distances, edges and planes, and uninhabited domains of certainty), infiltrating the organised urban plan”. (1)

Binding draws parallels between the ritualistic machine-like view of corporatism he depicts, and the traditional feudal systems of church, army and monarchy. The backbone of the suited culture as Binding has depicted in this exhibition, is a contemporised version of what has always existed and what the artist believes is a part of human nature.

“This is not really my version of the New Zealand ‘gothic’. I am not that interested in the visitation of ineffable, transcendent things bumping in the night, or emblematic endgame national strangeness. This is the stranger-still mystery of the banal-sane urban existence, the organised life in it, and what contradictorily cohabits its hills and valleys”.(2)

This exhibition amounts to a surrealised and unnerving exploration of the signs of the times. Binding’s imagery is appealing and quirky, like imagery from nineteenth century European children’s stories, and here is a definitive sense of a parochial story set here, in New Zealand.

(1) Artist statement 2005
(2) ibid