October 11 - October 28, 2000 Unfinished Business

The October 2000 Gow Langsford Gallery Paul Dibble exhibition is titled “Unfinished Business”. The title refers to a series of works made in the early 1990s (and late 1980s) that featured objects arranged in a line on a base. These new works liken to the early images, but some are made full-sized (some 2.7 metres high), something that in their first rendering Dibble had neither the technical skills nor financial backing to be able to do. The series of elements are playfully arranged as a sort of visual narrative, a story rendered from a series of parts.

“Dibble’s most recent works demonstrate his mastery of this multi-part technique. In An Assemblage of Stillness the equal weighting of the forms is assured and apparently effortless. The separate components are like words linked in a row, like hieroglyphs or pictograms, formally satisfying, and with the promise of a message waiting to be decoded.  A falling leaf, a tattooed Eve, an elegant urn and a propped-up huia feather – collected from some lost paradisial garden”.