City Art Rooms is pleased to present a project by Clinton Phillips and a joint musical and sound performance by the group Polyphonics. The Space Between Notes takes it cue from improvisation in music to generate alternative approaches to exhibiting and creating visual artwork.

Over the course of two weeks, Clinton Phillips will present a series of finished and work-in-progress pieces that will accumulate in different formats throughout the space. Using the gallery as a blank page from which to compose and re-hang works, the space develops into an ever-changing collage through the artist’s gestures and arrangements. This resists a final hang or presentation, so that both artist and audience can experience numerous ways to encounter the work. The gallery also becomes a studio for experimentation; Phillips will create unannounced live drawings on the floors, store his materials, cast-offs, and waste alongside finished pieces, while sound group Polyphonics will also rehearse and play in the space.

Two stringed instruments in the exhibition are designed from the shape of a violin bridge, which vaguely resembles a creature out of the popular Atari game, Space Invaders. This shape has been re-imagined, through drawings, into a 3-dimensional oblong by incrementally increasing the scale of the bridge. Multiple parts are then fashioned into one body, and four strings stretch across the expanse of the instrument. These strings can be fine-tuned into harmony by turning pegs, and their sounds reverberate over a polystyrene chamber. The final result is a sculptural zither, which can be plucked or played with a bow.

Challenging the monumentality of traditional sculptural media, Clinton Phillip’s primary material, polystyrene, is familiar as light-weight and efficient in packaging and protecting innumerable objects in our daily lives. The versatility of polystyrene, which can be easily sliced, extruded, melted, and re-formed, allows Phillips to build up layers and create modular forms. This process begins with translucent, schematic drawings encased in resin, which often abstract recognisable shapes through layering silhouettes and rescaling. The resultant forms often possess multiple options for how they may be presented. Phillip’s ambitious Section 23, for example, was shown as a stack of boxes, which could also transform into a geometric great white shark. This purposeful flexibility of the sculptural object echoes the artist’s decision to use multiple spatial and temporal resolutions in the exhibition.

Clinton Phillips holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the Whitecliffe College of Art and Design. The Space Between Notes is his second exhibition held at City Art Rooms, and he has recently exhibited in the Bridge Art Fair, Berlin, Nat’l Drawing Art Awards and Wallace Art Awards 2006-7. Polyphonics is a duo composed of Phillips and artist James McCarthy. They have been joined previously by other sound artists including Sam Morrison and Phil Dadson. Recent performances were held at Cross St Studios, Auckland, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth.