House Style: James Cousins

Thresholds are mysterious zones of interaction, spaces of transition and exchange that mediate between different realities. In James Cousins' House Style, stencil processes, residual traces, and layers of paint combine to create visual thresholds through which images emerge gradually, slowing perception and disrupting fixed relationships between surface and representation. Viewers find themselves looking both at and through the painting, navigating spaces where forms emerge, recede, or remain only partially resolved. What might count for meaning is located not solely within the depicted image but within the gaps, traces, and intervals that separate what can be seen from what remains obscured. House Style brings together a new group of paintings that explore the unstable space between visibility and concealment, public and private, history and memory. Central to the exhibition is the relationship between process and image.

Provisional gestures often emerge from early acts of calibration and testing. These marks are not erased but preserved by the artist, allowing evidence of experimentation, uncertainty, and decision-making to remain visible. By contrast, the stencil is frequently one of the final procedural acts, translating sourced imagery into paint before disappearing from the finished work. Although absent, the stencil continues to structure the image that remains, acting as a trace of an invisible framework that shapes the painting's formation.

Predominantly, works in the exhibition draw upon sourced photographs documenting the architecture of Ōtautahi Christchurch's electrical substations. Constructed throughout the early twentieth century, many of these buildings adopted civic styles such as Neo-Classicism and Beaux-Arts architecture, projecting ideals of permanence, public service, collective ownership, and state responsibility. Though highly technical structures, their designs allude to infrastructure aligned to values of a public good, embodying the presence of government within everyday life. The exhibition's title, House Style, is drawn from a sourced image used in the production of one of the paintings, depicting a substation designed to resemble a suburban house. A structure once intended to signify public ownership and state presence instead adopts the visual language of the private home, concealing its infrastructural function behind a familiar domestic facade.

This shift resonates with broader social and political transformations. Following the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, many public utilities were corporatised, privatised, or reorganised along commercial lines. Infrastructure remained physically present, yet its relationship to public ownership became increasingly opaque. Through veils and layers, these paintings create effects that simultaneously reveal and conceal. The images of the substation emerge between visibility and obscurity, neither fully present nor fully absent.

The studio itself becomes a parallel threshold. As a site of testing, revision, and production, the studio contains many of the secret processes that inform the finished work. The traces preserved within these paintings allow aspects of this private activity to persist within the public space of exhibition. In this sense, the substation and the painting become counterparts: both are systems whose visible surfaces conceal complex structures of organisation, labour, maintenance, and decision-making.

Situated within the context of contemporary Aotearoa, House Style is a meditation on the layered legacies of state formation, public infrastructure, neoliberal restructuring, and the changing visibility of collective institutions. The substation emerges not simply as an architectural subject but as a repository of shifting ideas about ownership, access, authority, and belonging. These works attempt to create visual dissonances that trace the ways histories embedded within the built environment continue to shape contemporary experience, even when they are no longer fully visible.

Rather than offering fixed conclusions, House Style encourages viewers to occupy a space of negotiation. Here, infrastructure becomes memory, process becomes image, and the threshold itself becomes the site where public histories and private forms converge. The title points to an architecture that looks like a house but serves another purpose, a condition echoed throughout the exhibition, where surfaces disclose and disguise, and where what appears familiar is revealed to contain more complex and contested histories.