The New Salon questions the conventions of display: how should art work be hung? How should they be displayed? How can works by quite different artists and media become thematically linked? Can a co-joining narrative be just a monochromatic palette? Reprising the Victorian tradition of a massed display, The New Salon is a door through to a different way of thinking.
In a deliberate contrast again, the portal of The New Salon is counter-pointed by the new works of Graham Bennett, Mark Mitchell, Neil Adcock and John Parker where the gallery space is restructured into a sequence of plinth-based spaces, where viewing takes place in the round.
Graham Bennett, the focus of a major book just published, presents narratives of Pacific navigation and place. Mark Mitchell’s celebrated ceramics question what we see and how we see it, while at the same time we witness his “interfering” with – by extending - the formal qualities of each object. Neil Adcock’s pounamu sculptures act as cultural signifiers just as clearly as they imply conversations about personality and elicit sensations of the landscape. John Parker, ceaselessly inventive and restrained, delivers an object-based still life tableaux in charcoal grey and cream white.