ARTIST and musician Campbell Neale is helping Adam Art Gallery make art in a car park.
This Thursday, February 3, Neale will create a live, improvised performance - part of Adam Art Gallery’s The Commons Project.
“This project looks at public and common spaces, how art interacts there, and how these spaces can be reclaimed. Creativity can be something that inhabits a public space,” Neale says.
The project confronts issues surrounding what is public and private space. Deriving from pre-industrial agrarian times, the commons was a demarcated site that could not be commodified. It was neither public nor private. Sound performances, commissioned by the Adam Art Gallery, seek to establish the commons again within the fabric of Wellington by challenging expectations of what art and music can be, and where it should be performed.
This is where Neale comes in. He performs with his friend Alan Courtis, from Buenos Aires, in the James Smith Carpark, with no rehearsal and no idea what he will play.
“I have resisted the urge to go to the car park and suss it all out because of the exploratory nature of the project,” he says.
“Car parks are scary, dingy places and I’m putting low-grade electronic, improvised music to it. I’d like to frame the echoey sounds that already exist there – the peculiar squeak of noises of cars turning.”
Neale met Courtis in LA, when he fronted Birchville Cat Motel.
“We jam in an incredibly focused but impromptu way and have to be open to let people into that as well as interact with the car park. It questions ideas about what art is and how it confronts the public.”
Now, Neale is based in Featherston, after taking a year off teaching at Sacred Heart in Lower Hutt to concentrate on his art and new project Our Love Will Destroy The World.
“It’s the Aro Valley of the Wairarapa”, he says laughing.
In Our Name: The Commons Project, sound performance: Campbell Kneale and Alan Courtis, James Smith Carpark, 162 Wakefield Street, 6pm, February 3.