The past is the subject of this photograph by Paul Johns – as it is the subject of all photographs. A photograph exists in the present, but what is photographed is immediately and always the past. Rather than reconstruct a specific memory, Johns’s photograph alludes to the construction of memory itself – partial, hallucinatory, inconclusive and often pieced together afterwards from photographs. The rabbit’s head somehow suggests the fevered vision of a dream, or perhaps the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – always late and anxiously running to catch up.

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

Paris-born Louise Henderson moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1925 and was in her mid-eighties when she took up one of the boldest painting projects of her long career: a series of twelve large cubist-inspired canvases tracking the months of the year. In employing the soft colours of late spring, November conveys a certain sense of lightness and serenity. Painted at a scale that feels architectural and with a vigorous structural arrangement, it can be seen as an expression of the artist’s pleasure in the visual language of modernism.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )