to the Glory w/ Super Mario
Year: 2018
Material: Timber, drafting film, led strip
Dimensions (W/H/D): 1400mm x 2800 x 4000
A re use of the staircase from Catch a Star installation in Nelson Cathedral, Nicholas Haig curated this show in g-space at NMIT. Nick’s excellent writing for the piece goes like this:
There is a moment part way through Tomas Tranströmer’s poem Allegro when the ground seems to give way. It’s not a profound moment but a comedic one, and it comes – in this nimble but melancholy poem concerning the music of the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn – when Tranströmer writes of “shoving his hands in his haydnpockets.” There was a similar moment when I first came across Nelson-based artist and designer Lee Woodman’s installation, Catch a Star, in the Nelson Cathedral.
An elegantly conceived set of meticulously constructed festive objects suddenly became an absurdist assemblage at the thought of “Super Mario” bursting through a stained-glass window in the hunt for ‘the glory’. The staircase displayed here was part of a suite of works Woodman made on commission for the Nelson City Council for the purpose of enhancing the city during the Christmas celebrations of 2017.1 The work Woodman produced was designed specifically to hang high above the nave in the Nelson Cathedral. Comprised of the staircase, a series of platforms and boxes and the titular star, and constructed from timber, drafting film, thread, lasercut Plywood, acrylic, and strip LED lighting, the installation riffed on the “journey to the star” by the three wise men. A riff with a twist, however, in that a parallel inspiration was Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 universe.2
Now, resting somewhat uncomfortably on top of Woodman’s work ladder in the space of the gallery, the staircase is doing a different sort of work, is signifying differently. But, I would suggest, it is still involved in a form of “glorious” work: the: “glorious work” of artistic activity. But then again, although it now looks more akin to a Sol LeWitt sculpture than an oversized Christmas decoration, To the glory (with Super Mario) (as it has now been titled) still carries with it traces and resonances of its initial purpose while also (forgive the wending train of thought) hinting at what Woodman managed to spirit – gently – into the Cathedral in the first place: pieces of capitalistic gaming and spectacle culture. A simple scenario, deftly conceived.
1 The staircase and other objects will return to the Cathedral next Christmas.
2 The Super Mario “platform” games involve “Mario” ‘running and jumping ‘across platforms and atop enemies in themed levels. The games have simple plots, typically with Mario rescuing the kidnapped Princess Peach from the primary antagonist, Bowser.’ A product of the 1980s, Super Mario was developed by Nintendo, a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company.
