Notes On: Redemption arcs

Columns

13 Sept

Connie Brown on Claudia Kogachi’s exhibition New Moon, Melanie Roger Gallery, 31 August – 17 September 2022.

Last year, when my Grandad died, someone tried to console me by pointing out the full moon was in Scorpio. “Death energy,” they said, with a shrug and a look that seemed to suggest this new information should relieve me of my grief. I would have been upset if it wasn’t so funny. Poor moon, getting such a bad rap. There it is just getting up every night, overseeing the tides and helping the plants grow, and we’re down here blaming it whenever someone dies or we reverse into the bollards in the Countdown car park.

In Blue Moon, Claudia Kogachi’s solo exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery, the sun is the misanthropic one, which feels more likely for anyone who has ever forgone sunscreen on an overcast day thinking they’ll be all good. Pictured in six small oil pastel drawings in different colourways like Warhol’s Marilyns, Kogachi gives each sun a heart-shaped smirk and villainous eyes. The moon brings all sorts of spooky creatures and shapeshifters out into the night under its silvery light, but they seem nice enough by comparison. Three wolves share a steak politely at a candlelit dinner; a rat sits on the windowsill looking out to the night and dreaming of a moon made of cheese; centaurs bathe by a waterfall, stirring the slow-moving currents into a love heart with their hooves. Each is held in a frame hand-carved by the artist and her partner, Josephine Jelich, that make the works look holdable and almost like stamps, their edges notched as though cut out with scrapbooking scissors.

The weirdos, the undead, and all other beings shunned by day and commonsense are welcomed by the moon—“a natural satellite” according to the poem Alba Jelich wrote to accompany the show, receiving and dispatching all manner of signals, and in that way, “not much different to love.” In the same way, the moon might also be not much different to painting, which Kogachi makes a home for these same creatures, for experiments in minor materials, for cross-pollinating myth, pop culture and personal lives, for whims and fancies, and for humour.

Claudia Kogachi, *New Moon*. Installation view, Melanie Roger Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau, September 2022

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