Exhibition

Closer: Old Favourites, New Stories

New perspectives on ten of the Gallery’s best-loved paintings.

Commentary
Laurence Aberhart

Laurence Aberhart

New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’

Commentary
Your Hotel Brain

Your Hotel Brain

We recently opened a new collection-based exhibition, Your Hotel Brain. Curated by Lara Strongman, it focuses on the cohort of New Zealand artists who came to national – and in some cases international – prominence in the 1990s. The title of the exhibition is a phrase drawn from Don DeLillo’s epic novel, Underworld, published in 1997. It gestures towards the way that pieces of information float through your mind, checking in and out, everything demanding attention, everything happening all at once – a metaphor for postmodernism in the 1990s and for the increasing slippage of context in the digital era. The 1990s were a time of great social and cultural change in Aotearoa New Zealand, set against a broader backdrop of globalisation and the rise of digital technologies. Artists, as ever, registered these cultural shifts early. We asked a number of people who were working in the arts at the time to recall their experiences of the 1990s.

Exhibition

Your Hotel Brain

Energies and anxieties from the threshold of the new millennium.

Exhibition

Henri Matisse: Jazz

One of the most-loved artworks of the twentieth century

Exhibition

Len Lye: Stopped Short by Wonder

An exhibition inspired by a flash of light and a thunderclap.

Exhibition

Aberhart Starts Here

Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart

Exhibition

Marie Shannon: The Aachen Faxes, Christchurch remix

Marie Shannon's sound work contemplates love, loss, and the longing for emotional connection across distance.

Artist Profile
The Devil’s Blind Spot

The Devil’s Blind Spot

Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.

Exhibition

The Devil's Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography

Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.

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