Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
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Late night Wednesday until 9pm
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Exhibition
Billy Apple: THE BRIDGE: An Institutional Critique
Billy Apple proposes an alteration to the Gallery’s wavy bridge.
Notes
Imagined Projects II, Limeworks by Doris Lusk
This article first appeared as 'Work evolved from years of practise' [sic] in The Press on 3 November 2016.
Collection
Laurence Aberhart Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
Laurence Aberhart took this photograph in March 1983, just before he left his home in Lyttelton to move to Russell in the Far North with his family. It depicts his daughters and a small family friend, framed by a niche in the wall of the cold store in a Lyttelton fish and chip shop. (The building later became the Lava Bar attached to the Volcano Café, and was demolished following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.) Because he knew he was leaving, Aberhart took photographs of local places – houses, shops, old commercial signs – that he'd previously noted when driving around Christchurch and Lyttelton. ‘They were, in the main, sites that weren’t enough as a straight photograph,’ he commented. ‘And so I put people into them.’
The girls sit in a compressed space that’s too small for adults for enter. Kamala and Charlotte gaze steadily and coolly at the camera while little Astral looks off to the side, one finger in her mouth. They are serene, yet fiercely present and full of life. The recessed composition of the figures brings to mind statues placed in niches in Gothic cathedrals: it is as if they are three putti or cherubs come to life in the modern, secular world. Aberhart has described himself as a recorder of ‘a world that can’t stand long’ – the phrase comes from the song of the same name recorded by American country and gospel singer Roy Acuff in 1948. Before entering his darkroom, he often plays it. ‘This world can't stand long / Be ready and don't be late…’ A chronicler of the New Zealand vernacular, Aberhart’s world is the overlooked and the outmoded, which he continues to photograph with the same century-old view camera he bought second-hand in the late 1970s.
Collection
Fiona Pardington Believe
History often only tells one side of the story. This photograph by Fiona Pardington was inspired by visiting the archive of Dr A. C. Barker at Canterbury Museum. He was the ship’s surgeon on the Charlotte Jane, the first colonial ship to reach Canterbury, and made photographs of early Christchurch. The letters his children wrote to their uncle in the 1860s provide a view of early Canterbury childhood from the perspective of colonising settlers.
Fiona has said: “I was drawn in by the delicate fine paper, iron gall inks, smudged and blotched marks, spelling mistakes and a smeared fingerprint – a tantalising forensic touch. I immediately had an aching feeling in my bones, for the land, the birds impacted by the Pākehā kids and their guns, gulls and adventures. I could feel their father standing there with his camera, and marvelled at the wobbly copperplate words giving a rare and earnest view into a child’s world in the Christchurch bush teeming with a luxuriance of native wildlife I could only mourn today.”
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Liyen Chong Flying Oblique
Liyen Chong is perhaps best known for a series of embroideries she made using her own hair, one of which, I am Here and There (2007), is also held in our collection. She made Flying Oblique just after she had decided she would not make any more embroideries – and just before she had her hair shorn off completely. Named after a position in the Chinese martial art Tai Chi, it suggests both Liyen’s awareness of her outward appearance and a desire to move beyond it. Using a camera with a self-timed shutter, she has caught herself mid-swing, her long hair forming a sweeping curve that echoes several other circular elements she has placed around her studio.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
