Exhibitions
Events
On display
Speaker of the Month: October
Light and Reflections book cover
Courtesy of the author
Images from Light & Reflections by Matthew O'Reilly
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Friends $5, Non-Members $10, Students with ID free
Light and Reflections: The house and the art in our lives The book, its origins and its ideas.
Join writer, editor, and historian Helen Beaglehole for a fascinating talk about her recently published book, Light & Reflections. This is a tour through the Beaglehole house in Karori, a house filled with an extraordinary collection of contemporary New Zealand art and the family who put it together over two generations and nearly ninety years. It’s a story that is both quietly domestic and culturally significant – for while much has been written about our leading artists, little has been documented of the lives of their work in private collections and the people who live alongside them.
A review in Art New Zealand commented: 'The rewards of Light and Reflections are many and rich...Beaglehole writes with wit, a warm restraint and the kind of perception that comes from decades of living with and looking at the things around her - books, art, furniture, curtains, rugs, windows, views, weather, sunlight and other people...Matthew O’Reilly’s photography is beautifully subjective and expressive... This is...a tour de force.
Copies of Light and Reflections: the House and the Art in Our Lives will be available to purchase on the night.
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
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.
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.
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.
