JACK STRAKER
The march of the Minions
Saracen Jack’s spaceship is infected with a pox of pock-ridden Minions. If he doesn’t watch it they will multiply, grow to bulbulous proportions and gobble everything they can sink their scalpel-sharp teeth into. Including him. If he doesn’t watch it.
So goes the story of dodgy intergalactic trader Saracen Jack who, despite the best efforts of his bodyguard (and undercover Galactic Policeman) Sal, is suffering a visitation of gremlin-like Minions courtesy of his sometimes nemesis-sometimes trading buddy, Baron von Gittenstein.
It’s not looking good. The Minions – like fanged, warty potatoes with spindly legs and bulging eyes – are, indeed, multiplying. There are twenty-five of them. Fifty! One hundred!
And here they come, marching across the inky, carpeted floor of Gisborne art gallery PAULNACHE.
The voracious Minions, cadaverous Saracen Jack, scaly lizard-like Sal (“some people call him Sally . . . but they only do it the once”) and the toadish Baron are the offspring of sci-fi inspired sculpture artist Jack Straker.
There are more than 120 figures in total, all battling their way across the floor in Straker’s debut solo gallery exhibition.
The story they are enacting is just one episode in The Adventures of Saracen Jack, which is in itself just one of the bulging brainful of tales Straker uses to inform his characters.
“Having that back-story gives them so much more depth,” he says. “They are not just figures . . . they spring from an on-going narrative.”
Straker has become known for his out-of this-world figurines since he moved to Gisborne two years ago, though their origins reach further back than that -- back to a sci-fi obsessed childhood and a 1980s job making sculptural creepy crawlies for Department of Conservation displays.
His latest platoon of baked polymer clay characters, however, were spawned only in the last three months, Straker tackling an intense workload of Minion-making to meet the deadline for his first solo show.
He blames the weight of that workload on gallery co-director Matt Nache Clarke who, upon sighting Straker’s nigh-on indestructible fanciful figures, imagined a scenario where their numbers were multiplied many times over.
But rather than submit a hotch-potch of mismatched individuals, the artist decided to build on the idea of an army. Though the Minions are individually constructed, for example, they have familial similarities in colour and confirmation. And that effect is further magnified by Baron von Gittenstein’s wily decision to clothe himself in the skin of a slaughtered Minion.
The impact is one of symmetry within chaos – like an army of soldiers that, though running amok, are all doing so in the same coloured uniform.
There is serious intent to the show. Straker says that, during its construction, he was preoccupied by thoughts of the ultra-infectious H1N1 (swine flu) virus as well as the environmental crimes of humans “which are like a virus on the planet”.
The overwhelming effect, however, is the somewhat frivolous compulsion to dive into the fray and to begin pitting the mangy Minions against one another.
Is that allowed in an art gallery?
The Adventures of Saracen Jack, sculptural works by Jack Straker, opens at PAULNACHE at 5pm tomorrow and will be installed until September 24.
Written by Kristine Walsh, THE GISBORNE HERALD