Exhibitions
Events
On display
Tim Nees: The Risk of Being Nowhere
Photo: Tim Nees
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Friends $5, non-members $8, students with ID free / no booking required
As the Christchurch rebuild intensifies and new buildings almost outnumber empty sites in the CBD, there is no doubting the city has gained many fine works of architecture. The profession’s architectural awards underline this.
Yet when the overall quality of the urban environment is considered, the most frequent public response is disappointment. Is there a disconnect between public expectations and built outcomes, and does it stem from a lack of identity and awareness to place, or from a lack of substance or meaning in the new architecture? Can we claim that ‘newness’ and ‘style’ is not the issue, but that ‘meaning’ and ‘connection’ is?
Tim Nees is a practising architect and branch chair of the New Zealand Institute of Architects in Canterbury. He is also architect-in-residence at the University of Canterbury’s College of Engineering and has been a recipient of the NZIA National Award for excellence in architecture.
Related reading: Architecture, Friends
Exhibition
Reconstruction: Conversations on a City
23 June – 14 October 2012
In acknowledging architectural heritage loss in this city's present and past, this visually rich outdoor exhibition unfolds the ways in which dreams and values have been given form in our built environment.
Interview
The fault is ours: Joseph Becker on Lebbeus Woods
There was a packed auditorium at CPIT in Christchurch this August when visiting San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Joseph Becker delivered a lecture on architect Lebbeus Woods. And it wasn't hard to guess why. In addition to many other achievements, Woods is renowned for his highly speculative project, Inhabiting the Quake. Senior curator Justin Paton spoke to Becker about Lebbeus Woods, and what Christchurch might learn from him.
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
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.
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Article
Laying out Foundations
Looking broadly at the topic of local architectural heritage, Reconstruction: conversations on a city had been scheduled to open at the Gallery but will now instead show on outdoor exhibition panels along Worcester Boulevard from 23 June. Supplementing works from the collection with digital images from other collections, curator Ken Hall brings together an arresting art historical tour of the city and its environs.
