Coffee + Art: June

Grant Lingard Black/white 1985 Wood, nails. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, gift of Jonathan Smart and Jane Keenan in memory of Grant Lingard, 1996

Friends

Past event

The Thirsty Peacock

Purchase your own drink / Talk: free

Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation at The Thirsty Peacock, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite at 12pm. Bookings are not required.

This month, join art dealer Jonathan Smart as he discusses Grant Lingard's Black/white on display in Perilous on the first floor.

Related reading: Friends

Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection

Making room for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas.

Speaker of the Month: October

A tale of two frames: a conservator's journey.

Julie King Memorial Lecture: Lissa Mitchell

THROUGH SHADED GLASS

As one of Aotearoa’s most knowledgeable and experienced photographic historians, Lissa Mitchell turned her attention to the early women photographers in this country in a new publication Through Shaded Glass – women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1970 (Te Papa Press). Her research for the book represents a significant milestone in foregrounding the involvement and photographic work of over 190 women makers of photography in Aotearoa prior to 1960. She spent years locating names, photographs and researching lives while exploring photographic practise where women have made strong contributions but have been sidelined or overlooked in this country’s photographic histories to date. These include collaborative working practises, photographers and the Second World War in New Zealand, non-binary practises, and the involvement of Māori women in making early photography here.

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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