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E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Speaker of the Month: Dame Anna Crighton
Anna Crighton
Friends
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Friends $5, Non-Members $10, Students with ID free
Our August speaker of the month will be a talk by Dame Anna Crighton all about the Robert McDougall Art Gallery collection policy in the 1980's and 1990's.
A significant dilemma at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery during these decades was the imposed constraints on the purchase of art works for a gallery of severely limited size. The innovative and varied responses finally led to the opening of a new public art gallery. As registrar at the Gallery during this period, Dame Anna Crighton had first hand experience about decisions that the public were unaware of.
Dame Anna Crighton was registrar or collections manager at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, from 1979 until 2001. She has been a Christchurch City Councillor and founded the Christchurch Heritage Trust. She was chair of the Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Buildings Fund Trust and president of Historic Places Aotearoa between 2010 and 2013. In the 2020 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to heritage preservation and governance.
Please note: this event was originally scheduled for July but had to be moved to August.
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.
