For the latest Te Tuhi Drawing Wall project Auckland painter Andrew Barber returns to an earlier series based on internal architectural spaces. In this series, Barber isolated and reproduced areas of an exhibition site which reside outside of his immediate exhibiting environment. On one occasion he represented a frontal profile of Artspace’s washroom wall, which being simplified down to a monochromatic palette had the appearance of an oddly conceived 1:1 architectural plan. In another instance the entire gallery of the artist run collective Gambia Castle was reproduced on four canvases, each approximating the scale of the individual walls. Painted by hand, the works delineate the contours of windows, doorways and power points and the skirting boards with the same methodology as an interior painter. In this way, Barber conceptually toys with the roles of artist and laborer to subtly introduce issues of social class into his paintings.
Rather than focusing on an external site, for his third large-scale wall project Barber turns his attention to the Te Tuhi Drawing Wall itself. Contending with notions of temporality and site specificity implicit to the Drawing Wall project, he abandons the architectural plan altogether to make his physical means of support, both wall and stretched canvas, the subject of the work.