Exhibitions
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On display
Coffee + Art
Julia Morison Teaching Aid# 1: Appropriate brushes for large flower paintings, 2001.
String, plaster, resin, galvanised pipe and set of ten wall labels. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 2008.
Friends
Past event
Universo Brasserie & Bar
Free (Art Bite talk only)
Join the Friends for a caffeine fix and great conversation in Universo, then enjoy a 30 minute Art Bite talk.
Art historian Robyn Peers discusses discusses Julia Morison's Teaching Aid# 1: Appropriate brushes for large flower paintings.
Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
Your Hotel Brain
13 May 2017 – 3 May 2018
Energies and anxieties from the threshold of the new millennium.
Collection
Michael Parekowhai Kiss The Baby Good-Bye (the maquette)
During the 1990s, Michael Parekowhai began reworking familiar objects as art. They were intended to be understood in several ways at once, opening up conversations around colonialism and cultural appropriation – the use of indigenous cultural material by non-indigenous people – in art. Gordon Walters’ appropriation of the pītau (fern frond) motif from Māori kōwhaiwhai painting has generated heated criticism and debate. Parekowhai’s witty response pays homage to Walters while reclaiming the pītau. By adding two circles to Walters’ composition, Parekowhai suggests a full stop to the matter.
(Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania, 2021)
Notes
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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
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.
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.
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.
