Michael Parekowhai Cosmo 2006. Woven nylon substrate, pigment, electrical components. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, the Jim Barr and Mary Barr Gift 2011
This Issue
Cover story
Here and Gone
In the last issue of Bulletin, senior curator Justin Paton wrote about the way the Christchurch earthquakes 'gazumped' the exhibitions on display at the Gallery – overshadowing them and shifting their meanings. In this issue, with the Gallery still closed to the public, he considers the place of art in the wider post-quake city – and discovers a monument in an unlikely place.
It was the best public sculpture Christchurch never knew it had. Kids peered out the car window to see it. Adults told stories about how long it had been there. Commuters measured their journeys by it. Quite a few locals simply hated it. But even if you were indifferent to its charms, it was impossible not to wonder how it got there – and whether it would ever get out.
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Bill Sutton Te Tihi o Kahukura and Sky VIII (The Citadel of the Rainbow God) 1979. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 1980
An Unquiet Earth
Having grown up in Wellington and the Manawatu I was accustomed to the earth shaking every now and then, or at least I thought I was. But nothing I had experienced could have prepared me for the violent awakening we received in the middle of that frosty September night in 2010, or the aftershocks that have followed.
B.W. Mountfort The Lamb of God and the Hierarchy of Angels (Rose Window, Christ Church Cathedral). Stained glass window by Clayton and Bell c.1881–2. Photo: Stephen Estall, 1998. Collection of Stephen Estall
Drawing Circles Inside the Square
Looking broadly at the topic of local architectural heritage and urban design, the exhibition Reconstruction: conversations on a city will be a major feature of the Gallery's programme when we reopen. Here, through a selected group of artworks, curator Ken Hall takes a brief historical visual tour of Cathedral Square, one of the city's best-known spaces, and finds himself in a landscape rendered barely recognisable.