Commentary
Commentary
Disruptive Landscapes
Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan includes moving-image works that examine our relationships to the land, whether historical, mythological or contemporary. They reveal how landscapes at once reflect our imagination and endorse national identity and societal structures. Landscapes are the aestheticised and mediated form of our natural surroundings, encoded with politics, cultural memories and belief systems; through distinct framing and composition they assert certain politics and mindsets, such as the notion of an untouched, unoccupied land, or the ideal ecosystem for a site.
Commentary
Morris Dancing in the Modelling Room
Arriving in Ōtautahi Christchurch must have been like arriving on another planet for Francis Shurrock. It was 1924, and he had travelled half-way around the world from England to take up a position as modelling and art craft master at the Canterbury College School of Art. Indeed, one of his pupils there, Juliet Peter, later described him as an “alien”, for the fresh approach to teaching that made him stand out from other teachers at the school. Nevertheless, Shurrock made Ōtautahi his home and never returned to England.
Commentary
Clocking Off
For most people, migration is a semi-abstract concept. It’s the fall guy for social issues, the topic of choice for political pundits. For me, it was something I romanticised. Although both of my parents were born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland I always thought of myself as the child of migrants, as all four of my grandparents were born outside of Aotearoa New Zealand and immigrated here for various reasons at various times. However, it wasn’t until I became a migrant worker myself, after accepting a job in the United States and navigating immigration firsthand, that I realised how difficult moving countries was.
Commentary
Japan circa 1970, Landscape and Chile
In 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the war between the Allied Powers and Japan. The United States and Japan also signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (known in Japan as Anpo), in which Japan agreed to host United States military bases. Nine years later a revised version of this treaty further formalising the arrangement between the two nations was negotiated by Japanese prime minister Kishi Nobusuke (the grandfather of future prime minister Abe Shinzo) and President Eisenhower.
Commentary
For the Price of a Pint of Beer
One of the joys of working at a public art gallery is the opportunity to really get to know an institution’s collection. I still remember, as a newly appointed curator of works on paper at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, coming across a cache of the brightest, most colourful and energetic prints I had ever seen among the Rex Nan Kivell collection of modern British prints. Given to the Gallery in 1953, the sheer breadth and depth of Nan Kivell’s incredibly comprehensive gift, especially when combined with the works he gave to Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, makes this a collection of British linocuts to rival those in major collections throughout the world.
Commentary
Opening the Archives
Amongst the regular books, artist books and rare books, the Robert and Barbara Stewart Library and Archives also contains a treasure-trove of letters, diaries, photographs, newspaper cuttings, videos and more. These fascinating objects shine a light on the lives and careers of many of the artists in our collection, telling us how they developed their works, how they related to their contemporaries, even where they went on their holidays. They are used a good deal by curators and researchers – and you can see some of them in our current exhibitions He Kapuka Oneone and One O’Clock Jump – but they usually live well out of sight.
Commentary
Turn Around and I’m Gone Again
The public lives of artworks can be occasional and itinerant—they emerge from the cosy sameness of storage into fresh locations and contexts. Many make their first public appearances alongside siblings from their maker’s studio, but later find themselves in very different company. While some resolutely maintain their identity no matter how or where they are shown, others open up to additional associations and meanings. Fittingly for a show about the power of alternative identities, several of the works in Dummies & Doppelgängers have evolved over time, shapeshifting into new lives or likenesses.
Commentary
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
Our expansive new collection exhibition explores the fundamental role whenua plays in the visual language and identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. Acknowledging Māori as takata whenua, the first peoples to call this land home, themes of kaitiakitaka, colonisation, environmentalism, land use, migration, identity and belonging are considered through collection works, new acquisitions and exciting commissions. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, moving image, printmaking and weaving by historical and contemporary artists are brought together to reveal how land has been a material and subject for art in Aotearoa for hundreds of years. Here, the Gallery’s curators each take a closer look at a key work from the exhibition that tells us something about our complex relationship with the whenua.
Commentary
The tide is in and the sea is like a blue mirror
I’ve always thought that if you’re a landscape artist, the working holiday must be the perfect getaway. You get to immerse yourself in an environment that may then become reflected in your art, a manifestation of your response and connection to a place. This was certainly the case for several Ōtautahi Christchurch landscape painters in the twentieth century: Doris Lusk and Onekakā, Bill Sutton and the Port Hills, Ivy Fife and the Canterbury High Country, Rita Angus and Wainui. For their close contemporary and friend Leo Bensemann it was Mohua Golden Bay, a landscape that had a profound effect on him when he holidayed there in the summer of 1965. It was a location he bonded with so much that he returned regularly to holiday and paint most summers for the rest of his life, in the process creating a remarkable body of over sixty paintings of the region.
Commentary
What Can Exhibitions Tell Us?
In a corner of Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, two self portraits are placed as if in conversation with one another. Made by Allie Eagle and Olivia Spencer Bower in 1974 and 1950 respectively, the pairing creates a striking vignette, and hints at some of the important themes that drive this exhibition.