Ice Melt was a series of performances nominally ‘held’ at the Adam Art Gallery on Sunday August 30th 2009, 7.30-8.30pm (NZ Time). Four artists were asked to form a temporary community, traversing space and time, to perform work that concerned ecological peril, dwindling natural resources and human mortality. Only one performance was held in the gallery; the others were planned for Skype and via telephone, their performances mediated by very imperfect technologies. The event was broadcast via Youstream.

"What's the alternative to optimism? Unless we act as if we can sort this out you might as well just get a hat and some sun tan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren." Nicholas Stern

A series of performances at the Adam Art Gallery featuring Martin Poppelwell (Napier), Murray Hewitt with Andy Hummell (Wellington), Sarah Jane Parton (Rarotonga) and Sam Hamilton (Auckland)
Web cast live from the Adam Gallery.

Curated by Sophie Jerram and Dugal McKinnon
Doors open from 7pm
Free entry
(Sep pages)
Murray Hewitt with Andy Hummell
, Sarah Jane Parton,
 Martin Poppelwell
, Sam Hamilton.

The Collection – Sarah Jane Parton

Sarah Jane intended to to show the video documentation of a performance called The Collection made about 11 hours earlier along Nikao beach in Rarotonga. Sarah Jane enrolled the Cook Island Ministry of Education to endorse her plan to rally school children to the beach to collect refuse on the beach for this performance. However, the only legitimate way to send any video files in the Cook Islands is to go into the Telecom building in Rarotonga and have the file uploaded.

This needs to be supervised by Telecom staff, and in the time that Sarah Jane had to make the work and send it to us, this was not possible.

Sam Hamilton

Our Grandfather is the Jaguar:
lines of decay and regeneration

Sam Hamilton is an Auckland artist whose work generally emanates from a core practice based in sound and music, heavily influenced by broader contexts.

Hamilton will be phoning in to the Adam Art Gallery from the Sky Bear's Cuddle Den's warehouse in central Auckland, on the landline phone. Using a variety of field recordings from bio-acoustic soundscapes to mechanical structures personally recorded in various locations throughout the Amazon rain forests of Brazil, Colombia and Peru for 4 months between 2007 to 2008, Hamilton will be staging some performative investigations into the degenerative and decaying characteristics and other subsequent aesthetic consequences of taking sounds from one place, and putting them in another.

In this case the physical process the sounds go through to reach your ears have become the parameters that have informed how they are treated creatively and philosophically. This idea is partially related to a general concern in how our cultural perspective of global ecology issues is filtered and cultivated via the process of their representation. That process and journey being from a specific point in time and place in the Amazon jungle, through a microphone, onto disc, into a computer, out of some speakers in a warehouse in central Auckland, through a variety of physical constructions designed specifically for this performance, into a telephone, down 800 kilometres or so of cables and wires, out of a telephone receiver and into the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington New Zealand.

Martin Poppelwell

Cityphilia

Martin Poppelwell has a practice on the East Coast of the North Island, and makes paintings and pottery. He is currently involved in building a new workplace on a property on the hill. He has a daughter who is 12 years old and who lives in Auckland. He is active in losing money, has an interest in debt, economics and has been attracted to the writing of John Lanchester who writes for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker.

Murray Hewitt with Andy Hummel

The Heinkel He 178, was the world's first aircraft to fly purely with a jet engine in August 1939. It was fitted with the gasoline-fuelled HeS 3 turbojet which was designed by Hans von Ohain and Max Hahn.
The first powered cleaner employing a vacuum was patented and produced by British inventor Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901. He watched a demonstration of a device used in trains that blew dust off the chairs, and thought it would be much more useful to have one that sucked dust. He tested the idea by laying a handkerchief on the seat of a restaurant chair, putting his mouth to the handkerchief, and then trying to suck up as much dust as he could onto the handkerchief.

Both Murray Hewitt and Andy Hummel have migrated from Hawkes Bay. This is the first time they have worked together.