Exhibitions
Events
On display
John Vea, Melissa Macleod and Janine Randerson
John Vea 29.09.2009 Tribute to Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga (still) 2013. Single-channel video. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2024
Talk
Meet in the exhibition
Free
Join the three artists as they discuss their works on display in He Kapuka Oneone, and how their art reflects the environmental changes happening in our lifetime.
John Vea is an Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist who works with sculpture, video and performance art. Vea examines narratives of labour, migration and gentrification that exist within Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Vea’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He completed his Ph.D. at Auckland University of Technology in 2021 and is currently a lecturer at the University of Canterbury.
Melissa Macleod lives in New Brighton, Christchurch. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily across sculpture, photography and performance. She has exhibited in numerous Aotearoa New Zealand galleries and artist-run spaces, and in Japan while on a Creative New Zealand Emergent Artist Grant. Her recent work examines issues surrounding the Eastern Christchurch community where she lives, addressing the marginalisation of this area, and responding to environmental impacts.
Janine Randerson is an Aotearoa New Zealand-based media artist. Her art practice includes site-specific installations, 16mm films, experimental video and atmospheric media. A recurring theme in her work is technological mediation in ecological systems with a particular focus on meteorology.
Related reading: Video art, Sculpture, Enviromentalism, Free
Exhibition
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
From 24 August 2024
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
Notes
A Quick Q&A with James Oram
Over lockdown, Ōtautahi artist James Oram made a new work for our online exhibition Spheres: An Online Video Project. I asked him a few questions about the making of the work, which is up on our website until the end of October.
Notes
Face Five
Christchurch-born and internationally renowned artist Ronnie van Hout has had a huge hand in our latest outdoor installation. Quasi, a five-metre-tall sculpture of the artist's hand and facial features, was unveiled this morning on the Gallery's rooftop, next to Gloucester Street.
Commentary
Memory Pictures
… it suits me to take pictures on celluloid that were formerly pictures of the mind, memory pictures, pictures of the imagination …
Commentary
Pauline Rhodes: Blue Mind
Painted blue and patterned with rust, the thin plywood panels and screens lean nonchalantly around the walls of the gallery and form a skyline of sorts. Across the floor sculptures intersect the space, with groupings of tall rods, waist-high enclosures, clusters of plywood shapes and a small kayak frame on salvaged seaweed and driftwood. Islands for the audience to navigate. The forms are roughly human in scale and relative to the body, generating an intensity and making this an immersive installation to wade through.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Interview
Power Play
In November 2017, Simon Denny’s The Founder’s Paradox opened at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, the first solo exhibition Denny had made specifically for New Zealand audiences in several years. His starting point for the project was local: the news, broken by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in early 2017, that the billionaire tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel was in fact a New Zealand citizen.
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Interview
Not Quite Human
Lara Strongman: The title of your new work for the Gallery is Quasi. Why did you call it that?
Ronnie van Hout: Initially it was a working title. Because the work would be outside the Gallery, on the roof, I was thinking of Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I was coming out of a show and research around the idea of the freak, the outsider and things that are rejected—thinking about how even things that are rejected have a relationship to whatever they’ve been rejected by. And I called it Quasi, because it’s a human form that’s not quite human as well. The idea of something that resembles a human but is not quite human.
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
