B.
‘Oceania’ x 2 in Wellington
Behind the scenes
I was pleased to see both components of Oceania in Wellington on the opening weekend. A great idea for City Gallery and Te Papa to mount connected exhibitions, effectively two distinct components of one show, and to market these together. It's an effective and rewarding combo for all those international visitors coming to the city over the next month or two.
In Te Papa I was delighted to see a home-grown collection-rich installation in their touring gallery, with a framework but without too many interpretative distractions. Some beautiful old museum vitrines were out and they looked excellent with a miscellany of smaller, more fragile items in them. It's good to know that they haven't been discarded.
City Gallery's more contemporary show drew heavily from Te Papa's collection and was perhaps a little more predictable. It was excellent to see Ralph Hotere's Black Phoenix, a knock-out work first shown in Wellington – and to slightly better advantage visually – in Shed 11 run by the former National Art Gallery as a contemporary space in the 1980s. I was also really impressed again by Tony Fomison's The Ponsonby Madonna, a work borrowed from Auckland Art Gallery.
Shigeyuki Kihara (concept developer) and Duncan Cole (photographer) Daughter of the High Chief, from Savage Nobility series, 2001. Image courtesy of the artists