Exhibitions
Events
On display
Speaker of the Month: September
Whiria te tangata: Weaving the People Together – 150 Years of College and Community
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Friends $5, Non-Members $10, Students with ID free
Terri Elder and Bojana Rimbovska
Digging through the University of Canterbury’s old cupboards, storerooms and shelves to uncover the interesting and sometimes odd heritage items accumulated over its 150 year history has been the task of the Canterbury Collection Survey project. The recent exhibition Whiria te tangata: Weaving the People Together: 150 Years of College and Community showcases many of the fascinating survey finds and unravels some of the stories of the people who worked and studied at Canterbury College/University of Canterbury.
In this talk, leader of the Collection Survey team Terri Elder and the exhibition’s guest curator Bojana Rimbovska will discuss the development of this ongoing project and highlight some of the neat finds as well as historical conundrums that have resulted from peering behind college doors.
Terri Elder is the curator of the University of Canterbury Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities and a current PhD candidate in Art History at the University. She has worked extensively in museums, art galleries, and collections throughout New Zealand as a curator and collection manager and is passionate about using museum objects and material culture for teaching and learning.
Bojana Rimbovska is completing a PhD in art history focusing on replication and copying in the nineteenth century. She was the guest curator for Whiria te tangata: Weaving the People Together, and has worked on curatorial and research projects relating to histories of education in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Related reading: Friends
Event
Artists at Work: EDWARDS+JOHANN
The artist collaboration EDWARDS+JOHANN will open their temporary studio at Sutton house to talk about their recent research and focus while the Artists in Residence at Sutton House for the month of May.
Event
Portrait Gallery Exhibition
Join the Friends for a talk and viewing of an exhibition, a tour of Kate Sheppard House and morning tea.
Event
Coffee + Art: May
Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation at The Thirsty Peacock, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite at 12pm. Bookings are not required.
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
To book tickets from your phone, follow these simple steps (or click here for instructions with images).
- Find the event you’d like to book for on our website www.christchurchartgallery/friends
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Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
Event
Friends 42nd Annual General Meeting
Please note, this date differs to the originally advertised date in March.
The 42nd AGM of the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū will be held in the Philip Carter Family Auditorium. All are welcome to attend.
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.
Interview
The London Club
In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…
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
President's Letter, June 2017
The new 6pm timeslot for the Friends Speaker of the Month series is proving popular, and it has been great to see so many of you coming out to hear from our fantastic speakers.
Notes
President's Welcome
The new year started with the Friends’ fantastic summer trip, visiting exhibitions at two of Canterbury’s regional art galleries.
Notes
President's Welcome
As we approach the first anniversary of the reopening of the Gallery, it seems like a good time to celebrate a year’s progress in the life of the city.
Notes
President's Letter Summer 2015/2016
This quarter the Gallery will reopen. It has been a long time coming by anyone’s standard. Although we have maintained connections through the award-winning Outer Spaces programme and nomadic, trailed around temporary gallery spaces; being able to once more step into the Gallery’s own space is an exciting prospect. I am not alone in looking forward to having the Gallery back in its rightful setting and reacquainting ourselves with the fabulous art we collectively own.
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.