Slow Wonder

, a current showing of Bill Culbert’s photography and sculpture work at Auckland Art Gallery, is verily profound, insightful, and in its meeting or questioning of modern sensibilities, archaic. I do not mean that latter as a criticism either. Not exclusively. If anything, this dual-proposal of slowness and wonder cements the reverent hush with which Culbert’s light-experiments sit church-like in the gallery space. The first section passes like the dawn of creation, a cosmic darkness punctured by the light-sprays of the artist’s early forays with camera obscura. and (both 1978) strike with their uncanniness—a lightbulb popping out of a split stone like treasure in a dragon’s egg, industrial neons melded to petrified wood. We’re already in a wonderland in which the dualities of light and dark are yet to sunder from their primordial promiscuity. As the accompanying catalogue informs us—clearly put together with love by exhibition curator Julia Waite and contributor Justin Clemens—these experiments are the synthesis of an off-kilter art education in which Culbert’s mentors instilled a sense of art’s more empirical function in the scientific imaginary. Rather than pure expression or aesthetics in a formalist (insular?) sense, Culbert was drawn to exploring the material conundrums