Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Fred Graham: Toi Whakaata / Reflections
The long and distinguished practice of Aotearoa New Zealand artist Fred Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) is celebrated in this selection of significant sculptures and relief works from 1965 to 2013.
Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan
Quietly powerful and immersive video works revealing the politics behind our view of landscape.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
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Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Collection
Pip Culbert Pup Tent
In this deconstructed tent, Pip Culbert has removed everything except the seams. What’s left is like a line drawing, or a plan of a tent at one-to-one scale. Culbert’s work claims space, yet sits lightly on the wall – much as a tent sits lightly on the land while providing a temporary home for its inhabitants. Culbert was a British artist who often exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand, regularly travelling to visit friends around the country. Her ‘ghost tent’ evokes a sense of movement through, and temporary encampment within, the local landscape.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Notes
New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Collection
Ivy Fife 69 Worcester Street
Ivy Fife directs the eye towards the red brick building, designed by local architect Cecil Wood and completed in 1928, home to Digby’s Commercial College in Worcester Street. Fife’s vantage point is her own rental accommodation in St Elmo Courts, a 1930-built apartment block that stood on the corner of Hereford and Montreal Streets until the 2010–11 earthquakes, opposite the old Canterbury College where she was a lecturer at the School of Art. Below, archetypal inner-city flats form a scruffy barricade between the refined Georgian-revival secretarial college and her elevated apartment.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Collection
William Dunning Reflection
Capturing a time and place that remains familiar for many, William Dunning’s photorealistic painting of Christchurch’s Cathedral Square pictures the window-reflected Regent Theatre and southeast corner of the 1960s modernist Government Life Building. Both were demolished after the 2010–11 earthquakes, as was the building in which they were mirrored.
Dunning is a Christchurch artist for whom local history is an ongoing concern. Reflection is a significant early work, and was presented by the artist in 2011.
(Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Julia Morison Some thing, for example
Julia Morison’s 'Some thing, for example' is like a broken life-support system for the waiting, blob-like entity which, although securely caged, seems more traumatised than dangerous, and without anybody to administer aid.
Like all who experienced the 2010–11 earthquakes in Canterbury, Morison, living near the edge of Christchurch’s cordoned ‘red zone’, was delivered a frequent heightened dose of adrenaline. With this, she encountered new aesthetic possibilities in found, discarded objects; sculptural media of a kind that the physical environment had never previously supplied. From a situation of dislocation and abandonment, she has created work of an unexpected material and formal beauty. (Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Glen Hayward Yertle
Glen Hayward’s towering Yertle had its origins in a collection of twenty-eight abandoned paint tins he spied in a back-of-house Christchurch Art Gallery storeroom, containing the residue of wall colours from past exhibitions. Meticulously recreating these tins out of wood, Hayward then painted his carved replicas, faithfully reproducing every smear and drip of forgotten paint.
Stacked up like its namesake, Dr Seuss’s vainglorious turtle king, Hayward's Yertle is a feat of painstaking fearlessness. (Above ground, 2015)
Collection
Robert Percy Moore Christchurch NZ 1923. No.1 (View of Christchurch City from the Cathedral Tower)
R. P. Moore ascends the cathedral’s spire to put his swivelling Cirkut camera to its familiar task. Up the narrow spiral stone staircase, a breezy ladder, past the bells, he reaches the balcony with its clear view facing west. A heavy morning frost means it is cold; the coal smoke of home and office fires lend partial soft-focus to the view.
The Square below has a single horse carriage and thirteen motorcars neatly parked. A tram beside the Clarendon Hotel curves right towards the Square. Tram tracks cut sweeping lines in the frost. None below have noticed the elevated cameraman, who turns the switch. it's five past nine as the camera begins its mechanical roll.
(Above ground, 2015)