Exhibitions
Events
On display
Speaker of the Month: September
Sure to Rise: The Edmonds Story
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Friends $5, Non-Members $10, Students with ID free
Richard Wolfe: Sure to Rise
Richard Wolfe has long had a fascination for the ‘Sure to Rise’ label on the tin of Edmonds baking powder, an essential ingredient once found in every New Zealand home. He included this universal symbol of the rising sun in his first book, on the history of New Zealand trademarks in 1987. Two years later when he and fellow author Stephen Barnett identified and compiled the first book on Kiwiana, they naturally included the Edmonds tin along with other so-called icons of our popular culture. Since then Richard has taken every opportunity to research and write about what is arguably this country’s most recognisable and durable trademark. In 2023 this culminated in the lavish volume, Sure to Rise: The Edmonds Story, co-written with Peter Alsop and Kate Parsonson and published by Canterbury University Press. Richard will talk about the label, now nearly a century and a half old, the company behind the product and its contribution to New Zealand social and culinary history.
Richard Wolfe has a BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts and a PhD in Art History from the University of Auckland. He was display artist at Canterbury Museum and, from 1978-97, curator of display at Auckland War Memorial Museum. He has written or co-authored over 40 books, on aspects of New Zealand art, history and popular culture, and is a regular contributor to the quarterly Art New Zealand magazine.
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.
