Laurence Aberhart Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, October 1981. 8 x 10" contact print. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2016
This exhibition is now closed
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
Aberhart started here. Between 1975 and 1983, when the internationally-renowned New Zealand artist lived in and around Christchurch, he began to photograph the everyday world around him. Christchurch is where Aberhart developed his eye for the things that later brought his work to international prominence: his interest in the vanishing past, vernacular histories, and typological series, all emerged over this period. Aberhart’s early photographs, some of them now iconic but many unseen or little known, reveal a city – and a way of life – that no longer exists. Long-gone fast food joints, masonic lodges, lonely monuments and cemeteries are brought together with stucco houses, weird domestic scenes and haunting family groups.
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Date:
15 September 2017 – 6 February 2018 -
Curator:
Lara Strongman -
Exhibition number:
1040
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: New Zealand, Photography
Exhibition
Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
From 23 March
Laurence Aberhart's 1983 photograph of Lyttelton children is displayed on our Gloucester Street billboard.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart: Nature Morte
24 September – 1 November 1992
Nature Morte is an exhibition of 105 photographs, taken between 1971 and 1989 by New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart.
Exhibition
Imposing Narratives
30 May – 7 July 1991
Beyond the documentary in recent New Zealand Photography.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart
1 July – 12 October 2008
Over 200 key works by an artist described as 'the essential visual poet of New Zealand's past'.
Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
However cold or wet it is as I write this (and certainly it’s raining at present), our September Bulletin heralds the coming of spring, and with it, the promise of growth, renewal and hope.
Commentary
Laurence Aberhart
New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’
Notes
Award wins!
We’re delighted to announce that Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū has won a number of accolades at the 21st Museums Australasia Multimedia & Publication Design Awards. The prestigious annual awards celebrate excellence in the Australasian museum sector and were presented on Tuesday evening during a gala dinner in Melbourne.
Notes
Time, memory, photography
As part of the recent Word Christchurch Writers and Readers Festival, Christchurch Art Gallery was a partner in the presentation of 'Remembering Anzac', a session which paired photographic artist Laurence Aberhart with historian Jock Phillips.
Notes
Kamala and Charlotte in the grounds of the Lodge, Tawera, Oxford, 1981, by Laurence Aberhart
This article first appeared in The Press on 9 July 2008
It is adapted from an essay in the book Laurence Aberhart, published by Victoria University Press in partnership with City Gallery, Wellington.
Notes
Largest ever Fiona Pardington exhibition opens in Christchurch
Death, sex, flesh and the female gaze are among the many themes explored in the Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation.
Artist Profile
Larence Shustak
Welcome to the world of Larence Shustak—a rule-breaker and image-maker who came of age in the creative cauldron that was New York City in the 1950s. He used a camera as a paintbrush, documenting as well as creatively interpreting his subjects: street people and nudes. Old folks and children. Jazz legends.
Commentary
Representing Women: Ann Shelton’s Dark Matter
What is ‘dark matter’? For theoretical physicists it is matter that cannot be directly observed but whose existence is nevertheless scientifically calculable – productively present yet simultaneously invisible. In a similar vein, the everyday phrase ‘dark matter’ describes objects, conditions and situations that harbour unease or trauma. Trauma that is often concealed, repressed, or buried. Both definitions are active in Ann Shelton’s mid-career review exhibition Dark Matter, and they provide a rich point of entry into this compelling collection of her photographic work. These are photographs that bristle with intensity and refuse to let their subjects die a quiet archival death.
Artist Profile
The Devil’s Blind Spot
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.
Commentary
The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
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.
Artist Profile
Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
My Favourite
Selwyn Toogood, Levin
I spent much of my adolescence in hospital, confined to bed due to a chronic illness. With a 14" TV beside me, I’d travel to imaginary places via the controller of my Nintendo games console. At the time, I couldn’t imagine walking to the letterbox, let alone experiencing the more exotic places of the world.
Article
Taryn Simon's known unknowns
In 2003, the American photographer Taryn Simon embarked upon a four-year heart-of-darkness journey. In response to paranoid rumours of WMDs and secret sites in Iraq, she turned her gaze to places and things hidden within her own country.