Interview
Interview
The Borrowings of Francis Upritchard
Arriving at the studio and home of Francis Upritchard on a Tuesday morning in East London, you’d hardly know she was opening a solo booth at Frieze Art Fair later that day, launching a fashion collaboration with Peter Pilotto the following day, and juggling studio visits and interviews throughout London’s hectic art-focused week. She’s the picture of tranquillity. The calm doesn’t last long though, as discussions of Christchurch’s rebuild, the Christchurch Art Gallery, our friends and memories are quickly interrupted by an escalating flurry of visitors and family dropping by and couriers collecting objects, packing crates, dropping off documents.
Interview
J.G. Thirlwell
J.G. Thirlwell is man of many monikers and even more projects: from the epic avant-garde electro-rock of his thirty-five-year Foetus act to scoring orchestral work; creating sound installations to writing cartoon soundtracks. Fellow sonic artist, Jo Burzynska caught up with the Melbourne-born but long-time New York-resident composer/producer/performer at the Gallery before the opening performance of his first ever New Zealand tour.
Interview
The World is an Abstracting Machine
Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding live and work in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. Working in a collaborative partnership as Haines & Hinterding, they explore the unseen energies that surround us through an artistic practice that incorporates science, the occult and philosophy. Bulletin editor David Simpson spoke to the artists in October 2016.
Interview
Unsung
Curator Peter Vangioni talks with Malcolm Riddoch, founder of the Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery in New Regent Street, and artist Bruce Russell.
Interview
Thieves in the attic
An unlikely domesticity pervades the small city studio. Drawings and photographed collages are bulldogclipped and hung against the wall. Odd-shaped articles are crammed into stacks of Dole banana boxes. Large cardboard cartons, colour-coded in capital letters – 'BLACK COSTUMES'; 'RED' – are piled up near the ceiling. The props, costumes, photographs and books, the disparate resources that feed into the free-ranging eclecticism that defines the playful, performative and exhaustively explorative collaborations of Edwards + Johann, are boxed up and put away.
Today, I am told, is talking day.
Interview
The fault is ours: Joseph Becker on Lebbeus Woods
There was a packed auditorium at CPIT in Christchurch this August when visiting San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Joseph Becker delivered a lecture on architect Lebbeus Woods. And it wasn't hard to guess why. In addition to many other achievements, Woods is renowned for his highly speculative project, Inhabiting the Quake. Senior curator Justin Paton spoke to Becker about Lebbeus Woods, and what Christchurch might learn from him.
Interview
It’s our party and we’ll cry if we want to
On 10 May 2013, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū turns ten. Which is fantastic. But it's probably fair to say that there's a bittersweet quality to the celebrations around this particular anniversary, as it also marks two years and eleven weeks of closure for the Gallery, and catches us staring down the barrel of another two years without our home.
It's frustrating. And then some.
However, we're not going to let these little, ahem, inconveniences get in the way of our party. Populate! is our birthday programme, and it's our attempt to bring some unexpected faces and figures back to the depleted central city. Bulletin spoke to the Gallery's senior curator Justin Paton about what he really wants for the tenth birthday, what he finds funny, and what he really doesn't.
Interview
Gregor Kregar: Reflective Lullaby
Justin Paton: As everyone who has seen your works at Christchurch Airport will know, you often make big sculptures with a geometric quality. Gnomes, however large, aren't the first things viewers might expect you to be interested in. What's the appeal of these figures for you?
Gregor Kregar: I'm interested reinterpreting mundane objects, shapes, situations or materials. In my large geometric works I do this by creating complex structures out of basic shapes—triangles, squares, pentagons and hexagons. And with the gnomes I am interested in how something that is usually made out of plastic or concrete and is associated with a low, kitsch aesthetic can be transformed into an arresting monumental sculpture.
Interview
Sian Torrington
Wellington-based artist Sian Torrington is currently working with the Gallery on a site-specific sculptural installation for Christchurch. She talks with curator Felicity Milburn about that project, her process, and about the residency she recently undertook in Samoa.
Interview
A Dark and Empty Interior
In B.167 senior curator Justin Paton documented his walk around the perimeter of Christchurch's red zone, and we featured the empty Rolleston plinth outside Canterbury Museum at the end of Worcester Boulevard. In this edition, director Jenny Harper interviews English sculptor Antony Gormley, who successfully animated another vacant central-city plinth—the so-called Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Gormley filled the plinth with 2,400 people, who occupied it for one hour each, night and day, for 100 days. Here, Jenny asks him about his practice, the value of the figurative tradition and whether he has any advice for Christchurch.