Exhibitions
Events
On display
Friends Visit to Taranaki and the Len Lye Centre
Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth
Friends
Past event
Option 1: $300; Option 2: $250
Join Marianne Hargreaves and Margaret Duncan on this exciting trip to the new Len Lye Centre at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth. This is the perfect opportunity for a full cultural experience in Taranaki.
Friday 11 November
Meet at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery on Friday evening for an exclusive tour of the gallery and its exhibitions, with director Simon Rees and curatorial staff. Have drinks and nibbles in the foyer before we meet up with Friends of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Saturday 12 November
Morning
Meet at the gallery for a talk on the architecture of the building from Simon Rees, followed by a Len Lye film.
Afternoon
We will travel to South Taranaki and visit the Tawhiti Museum. Widely acclaimed, the museum uses life-size exhibits and scale models to present our heritage in a series of engaging displays.
Late afternoon
We will visit the nearby Puketarata Garden. Following a tour of the garden, in full rhododendron season, we join our hosts for drinks and nibbles while we tour the art collection in their house.
Evening
Dinner at the Stratford Mountain House on Mount Taranaki, with breathtaking views towards Mount Ruapehu in the distance, then return to New Plymouth.
Sunday 13 November
Option 1
Travel to Parihaka Pā where we share the culture and traditional practices that are unique to the Taranaki region. We experience a pōwhiri (welcome), have morning tea, then hear the story of and take a tour around Parihaka – the birthplace of passive resistance where the prophets Tohu Kākahi and Te Whiti-o-Rongomai established a community seeking spiritual refuge against colonial hostility and oppression.
Option 2
Visit Puke Ariki Museum in New Plymouth at your leisure. We return to New Plymouth and visit an artist in his studio and then disperse for your own arrangements to return home.
Accommodation
Friends are responsible for arranging their own travel to and from New Plymouth, and accommodation for the duration.
Booking
Download the booking form
If you would like to join the Friends trip to Taranaki and the Len Lye Centre, please download, complete and post or email the form to Hannah Wilson at Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery, PO Box 2626, Christchurch 8140 or friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz.
We require booking by 31 July and payment by 31 August.
Related reading: special event, Friends
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
- Scroll down until you see the Book Now option; click on the down arrow to select the date you’d like to book then click book now
- Check you are booking for the event you’d like to attend
- If you are booking for a Friends only event, you will notice the number of tickets is greyed out. To login and access Friends only tickets, click on the door image at the top of the page
- Enter your email address and password
- Now that you’re signed in, you can enter the number of tickets you’d like to purchase
- Check you’re happy with your cart before you checkout
- Let us know who is attending the event
- Let us know of any special requests and tick the Terms & Conditions box then complete your sale
- Pop your payment details in then submit. And don’t forget to save your ticket to your phone for easy access on the day of the event
Don’t forget we’re here to help so get in touch if you have any problems!
friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
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Notes
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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.
