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Janna van Hasselt Salvation Mountain (from Being Nice is Easy series) 2016.
Glazed ceramic. Collection of the artist. Reproduced with permission

President's Welcome

Friends

7 December 2016. Posted by Marianne Hargreaves

As we approach the first anniversary of the reopening of the Gallery, it seems like a good time to celebrate a year’s progress in the life of the city.

As we approach the first anniversary of the reopening of the Gallery, it seems like a good time to celebrate a year’s progress in the life of the city. The Friends have collaborated with the Gallery to provide you with many interesting opportunities, from exclusive exhibition previews to fascinating lectures, and we hope that you have relished the chance to finally enjoy art on the walls of one of the city’s treasures again.

I have just returned from a trip which included a couple of American cities, where I found it hard not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the shows at major galleries; I found the smaller collections more rewarding and, on returning home, certainly appreciate what we have here. I really believe Christchurch Art Gallery punches well above its weight, and free entry to our public galleries is an amazing opportunity we enjoy in this country—long may it last!

During the year we supported the Gallery with the purchase of two works for the collection: Sophie Bannan’s multimedia work Untitled (2013–15) and Burn Out (2009), a digital video by Steve Carr. We will be adding to that following our recent successful fundraising auction. It was wonderful to see such a positive result after all the input from the artists, volunteers and especially the guests who come on the night.

You will soon be receiving your new membership cards. These will last for years, and can be automatically updated when you renew your membership. We have also improved the way we process members’ payments, with the addition of online banking and eftpos facilities.

The exhibitions at the Gallery over the summer period combine every genre of art practice, with much to attract you to return again and again, with any visitors you may have in the holidays. The Gallery’s wonderful new Design Store is now open, and with more and more cafes opening in the neighbourhood, it’s a great destination area.

We look forward to seeing many of you at our end of year celebration on 11 December, but to everyone we wish you a Happy Christmas, a bountiful New Year and lots of good art viewing and reading.

Related reading: Friends

Collection

Steve Carr Burn Out

Burn Out is a mesmeric, hauntingly beautiful, dirty-romantic evocation of New Zealand landscape—the dense green bush of west Auckland, which figures as the backdrop to a car doing a slow-motion burnout. It’s a kind of perverse homage to a long tradition of New Zealand art made in response to journeys through the landscape—Colin McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, Rita Angus’s Cass, Louise Henderson’s Arthur’s Pass.

Burnouts are a feature of bogan culture in New Zealand. They’re a kind of performance made with a car, in which you keep your handbrake on while accelerating, causing your tyres to spin and smoke and the car to lose traction on the road. There are hundreds of frenetic burnout videos on YouTube, which usually feature screeching tyres and heavy metal music and enthusiastic onlookers. In Carr’s video, the camera is still and the car turns a soundless arc in the middle distance. No one is about, and the only audience for the burnout is the videographer.

Carr’s interest in material transformation—where a character or an object slowly and purposefully changes state over the course of his videos—is a key aspect of Burn Out. Tyres become clouds of smoke; the car becomes a machine for self-expression; a burn out becomes a work of art.

(Your Hotel Brain 13 May 2017 - 8 July 2018)

Collection

Sophie Bannan Untitled

Sophie Bannan reaches back into the cultural memory of the city beyond her lifetime, and into the experience of her grandfather, the late architect Maurice Mahoney.With his business partner Sir Miles Warren, Mahoney designed many of the modern brutalist buildings in the city, a significant number of which were lost in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Bannan made her shelf of fragile ceramics from clay dug from the demolition sites her grandfather’s buildings once occupied: they stand as elegies to a vanished future. Objects are lost, but memory endures.

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

Commentary

Mediating Reality

In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.

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Commentary

Do You See?

With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.

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Collection

Julia Morison Dulia

In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”

The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.

Interview

The London Club

In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…

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