Simon Denny
Simon Denny’s practice emphasises relationships within communities of things; complex sculptural combinations of objects found, bought, gathered and made. Denny’s approach is sculpturally holistic, seeking and building upon analogous connections in and between the various material and formal aspects of his work.
Typically, Denny’s sculptural installations are formed from predetermined elements, studio-generated moments and fragments which are able to come together in a total assembly. The given space significantly determines final form and content, and the finished or presented work is maybe better described as the formal resolution of Denny’s working process: of sensing and facilitating interconnections between composite elements and the ideas they can contribute to a larger project.
Denny presents his audiences with situations that tend to foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose and action. Distinctively rough-shod, ad hoc constructions of everyday materials are combined with and often comprised of domestic ready-mades. His apparent crudeness and modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the work’s coming-to-be and sculptural conceit. Denny’s art-making is rooted in doing; considerations of performance and acts of making which embed the artist’s gesture and activity in his objects—objects chosen in the first instance for the character and activity they already inhabit.
The objects and materials Denny draughts have conventional lives, histories, and intended use values. There is a crucial moment in the work where these everyday languages begin holding hands with a more forthright parallel sensitivity to formal and materialist logics of ordering and production.
The work in ‘Telecom Prospect 2007’, Short Traditions (2007), recreates a like kind of idea flow. Denny finds approaches to expressionist gesture in a practical exploration of dynamic physics: forces act on bodies in the production and maintenance of form. Denny’s cumbersome engineering hardly aspires to science, but rather to the possibilities of immediate behaviour.
Ryan Moore
Simon Denny artist bio:
Born Auckland, 1982
Lives and works in Auckland
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland
Selected solo exhibitions include: 'Old Things', Michael Lett, Auckland (2006); ‘The Natural Order of Tact’, Michael Lett at LISTE06, Basel (2006); 'Arranging Sympathies', The Physics Room, Christchurch (2005); 'A Process of Bewilderment', Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington (2005).
Selected group exhibitions include: 'Break Construct', Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2006); 'Mostly Harmless: Performance series', Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2006); 'SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space', Christchurch (2006).
Image credits:
Simon Denny
Short Traditions 2007
wood, paint, laminate, sneaker, industrial fan, newsprint
Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland