Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends Visit to Jonathan Smart Gallery: Zina Swanson
Zina Swanson, Vivienne, 2018. Watercolour on paper, 350mm x 280mm framed. Courtesy the Artist and Jonathan Smart Gallery.
Friends
Past event
Jonathan Smart Gallery
50 Buchan Street, Sydenham / $20 (includes refreshments)
A talk on the new exhibition at the Jonathan Smart Gallery by Zina Swanson, inaugural recipient of the Grace Butler Memorial Foundation Award.
Swanson graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 2003 with a major in sculpture. Since then she has exhibited a number of large-scale sculptural works and drawings in solo and group exhibitions throughout New Zealand including at Christchurch Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington and Artspace (Auckland). She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and residencies such as the Apexart New York Residency Programme in 2014 and the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 2013.
Swanson's delicate and meticulously crafted sculpture, installation and watercolour works employ pre-existing scientific and natural histories in order to examine our relationship to the natural world.
This is a Friends only event. Click here to find out more about becoming a Friend and to get access to special events only available to the Friends.
Related reading: Talk, Friends
Exhibition
Georgie Hill and Zina Swanson: Breathing space
28 April – 20 May 2012
Strength, fragility and connection are at the heart of the second Rolling Maul exhibition, which features works by Georgie Hill and Zina Swanson.
Exhibition
Another Destination
16 November 2007 – 16 March 2008
This Exhibition will profile five artists – Francesca Heinz, Simon Lawrence, James Oram, Rachel Brunton and Zina Swanson – who will offer a fresh viewing experience that will surprise and challenge.
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.
