James Bellaney - Natural Landscapes

by Hana Aoake | 8:40 pm 11/07/2010

None Gallery

James Bellaney’s performance-based art exhibition at None Gallery uncovered the unconscious element of Bellaney’s creative process. Bellaney is a fourth-year Painting student at the Dunedin School of Art and this was his first solo exhibition. This exhibition is best described as a form of interactive, improvised performance art, which allowed for the viewer to observe Bellaney creating art live. Stylistically it was reminiscent of the intimacy felt in Surrealist automatism and American action painting. Bellaney, as he moved around his working space, used the convention of intimacy to draw the viewer’s attention to the physical act of painting, the finished product being the physical manifestation of the creation process. 

The atmosphere evoked intense sensory responses from the viewer through sound, sight, and – perhaps subconsciously – the smell of heavy paint fumes. Improvised live music seemed to inform Bellaney’s spontaneous gestural act of live painting, which involved methodically moving the paint by means of splashing, staining, stumbling, and dripping across the working surface. Often he used seemingly random tools. 

Visually, Bellaney’s physical act of live gestural abstraction drew the viewer into a trance-like state, as though you were a part of the painting process. His figure was reminiscent of Hans Numth’s portraits of Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock. It seems that Abstract Expressionism was an influence on Bellaney’s work, although his piece lacked the aggressive and often nihilistic undertones of Pollack. The works evoked a sense of distorted natural landscapes, conceivably to foreshadow the merging of nature and man. The idea of Bellaney’s works as abstracted landscapes was further reiterated by the video imagery that also featured in the space. The live painting was improvised, yet one felt that Bellaney’s choices were simultaneously considered and also loose in formal structure. The space was designed in a manner that presented the viewer with Bellaney’s previous creations, alluding to the consistent nature of Bellaney’s works, although each was distinctively different despite being created in the same way. Bellaney’s work is devoid of the portrayal of objects; the focus seemed to be aimed at initiating an emotional response from the viewer as well as expressing the physical manifestation of the artist’s subjective awareness and self-consciousness.

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