B.
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
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
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)
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)
Event
Louise Henderson: From Life / Curator's Talk and Morning Tea
Join lead curator Felicity Milburn as she takes the Friends on an exclusive tour of the Louise Henderson: From Life exhibition.
Event
Friends Speaker of the Month: Felicity Milburn and Melanie Oliver
Curators Melanie Oliver and Felicity Milburn talk about the benefits of staying local, and offer a special preview of their summer exhibition programme.
Event
Visit to Philip Trusttum’s Studio
A rare opportunity to visit the studio of well-known Canterbury artist Philip Trusttum.
Event
Petrena Fishburn: The Legacies Behind the Aigantighe Art Gallery
Petrena Fishburn, collection curator at the Aigantighe Gallery, Timaru, will speak on the legacies behind the Aigantighe Art Gallery.
Event
Friends Day Trip to Oxford
Join us on a day trip exploring art and artists in the Oxford area. The trip will include a visit to the Arts in Oxford Gallery and shop and the studios of two local artists.
Event
Richard Bullen
Richard Bullen, associate professor in Art History and Theory at the University of Canterbury, will speak about artworks made by Japanese inmates at the WWII Featherston Internment Camp.
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.
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…
Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
President's Letter, June 2017
The new 6pm timeslot for the Friends Speaker of the Month series is proving popular, and it has been great to see so many of you coming out to hear from our fantastic speakers.
Notes
President's Welcome
The new year started with the Friends’ fantastic summer trip, visiting exhibitions at two of Canterbury’s regional art galleries.
Notes
President's Letter Summer 2015/2016
This quarter the Gallery will reopen. It has been a long time coming by anyone’s standard. Although we have maintained connections through the award-winning Outer Spaces programme and nomadic, trailed around temporary gallery spaces; being able to once more step into the Gallery’s own space is an exciting prospect. I am not alone in looking forward to having the Gallery back in its rightful setting and reacquainting ourselves with the fabulous art we collectively own.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.