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Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Jo Torr: From Cultural Exchange to Self Portrait – The Shape of a Lineage
Jo Torr, Pacific Crossings, 2006 (left) and Transit of Venus III, 2004 (right)
Friends
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
$5 Friends / $10 Non-Members / Students with ID - Free
For more than two decades, Jo Torr has explored the histories that shape identity through textiles, costume and material culture. Her acclaimed sculptural works investigate the exchanges between European and Polynesian peoples during the era of Pacific exploration, revealing how people, ideas and traditions are transformed through contact.
Drawing on historical research and her background in museums, Torr creates works that blur the boundaries between sculpture, clothing and artefact. Series including Pacific Crossings and Transit of Venus use cloth to uncover overlooked histories and question how cultural identities are formed.
In this talk, Torr traces the evolution of her practice to her latest installation, Self Portrait: The Shape of a Lineage. Consisting of nine interconnected gowns spanning eight generations of her family, the work honours the women whose identities were often subsumed through marriage. Made from vintage domestic textiles, the installation is both a personal reflection and a powerful meditation on ancestry, memory and the lives that shape us.
Jo Torr is an award-winning New Zealand artist whose work is held in major public collections throughout Aotearoa, including Te Papa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, The Dowse Art Museum and Canterbury Museum. She has held various roles in museums and is currently Collection Curator at Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History.
Related reading: Friends
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.
