Laura Herford The Little Emigrant 1868. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, donated by Marjorie Sheat, 2007
Samuel Butler Portrait of John Marshman 1861. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1996
Nelson King Cherrill Daughters of John MacPherson c.1876. Carte-de-visite albumen photograph. Collection of Anthony G. Rackstraw, Christchurch
This exhibition is now closed
Colonial-era portraits represent a legacy that illuminates the present.
An exhibition built around colonial-era, mainly Māori, portraiture and works connected to the theme of colonisation. Portraits by Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer join early photographs by Dr. A.C. Barker, from Alfred Burton’s celebrated 1885 Maori at Home series, and a small number of Ngāi Tahu portraits. Other works with local connections relate to John Robert Godley and the Canterbury settlement, including a portrait by author and short-term sheep farmer Samuel Butler. William Dunning’s Colonisation Triptych (1999) represents a re-examination of history, and together these works of art represent a legacy that continues to resonate.
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Date:
18 February 2017 – 18 February 2018 -
Curator:
Ken Hall -
Exhibition number:
1028
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: New Zealand
Exhibition
Beneath the Ranges
18 February – 23 October 2017
Mid twentieth-century artists focus on people working the land
Commentary
Such Human Tide
The exhibition He Waka Eke Noa brings together colonial-era, mainly Māori, portraiture alongside objects linked to colonisation – it’s a predictably uncomfortable mix. While the degree of discomfort may depend on one’s background or degree of connection to an enduringly difficult past, objects related to emigration and colonisation can be a useful lenses. As relics from a specific period in global history, when the movement of (particularly) European people was happening at an unprecedented scale, they hold stories with a measure of complexity that obliges an open-minded reading. There is no denying that they speak of losses and gains, of injustices and rewards.
Notes
Nosferatwho?
For me, the best bits in vintage photographs are often the bits the photographer didn't really mean to capture.
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.
Exhibition
Aberhart Starts Here
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
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A selection of watercolours by one of Canterbury’s most treasured artists.
Exhibition
He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land
Canterbury modernist landscape painting from the collections of Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, poignantly revised from within a Kāi Tahu perspective
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Max Hailstone: Te Ara Takahaka Tapuae / Points of Reference
An exhibition of Max Hailstone's most controversial and important series, using the signatures of the rangatira (Māori chiefs) who signed New Zealand's Treaty of Waitangi in 1840