Shane Cotton Untitled (Head 6) 2012. Acrylic, photo etching and aquatint on paper. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased with the support of Christchurch City Council's Challenge Grant to the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust, 2014
This exhibition is now closed
Five significant works of art that look to traditional Māori architecture to inform modernist and contemporary Māori art practice.
As in Western art history, the development of Māori art maintains a significant connection with architecture. The wharenui (communal meeting house) is a sacred place for ceremony, with wood carvings adorning the interior and exterior of the building according to the whakapapa (genealogy) of its people. Kōwhaiwhai is the painted design on the rafters of the wharenui.
This exhibition features works of art by Michael Parekowhai, Buck Nin, Darryn George, Gordon Walters and Shane Cotton, each of which draws on shapes, forms and concepts within the wharenui for content, bringing them into the hard-edged geometric abstraction of modernist and contemporary Māori art.
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Date:
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017 -
Curator:
Nathan Pōhio -
Exhibition number:
1016
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: Māori
film
Darryn George speaks on the use of Te Reo in his work
For Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Week 2015, Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery invited five Māori artists to talk about the use of te reo in their work.
Exhibition
Ship Songs
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017
A small but poetic exhibition looking at early European and Māori representations of seafaring vessels, with the Charlotte Jane as a focal point.
Article
Speaking sticks and moving targets
New works by Shane Cotton
The Hanging Sky brings together Shane Cotton's skyscapes from the past five years. But the core of the exhibition is a big group of freshly made works of art. Senior curator Justin Paton first saw them in completed form during the show's installation in Brisbane. Here he describes his encounters with a body of work 'at once beautiful, aggressive, protective and evasive.'
Interview
Shane Cotton
Back on 20 September 2011, when our public programmes team began setting up the Hagley Park Geo Dome for a talk with Shane Cotton, they put out about sixty chairs and would have been glad to fill them. After all, it was a cold night in Christchurch, the roads were rough, the Geo Dome was off the beaten track and the quake had long since broken the rhythm of the Gallery's old Wednesday night programme of public talks.
Notes
Māori video artists on display in Christchurch
Works by more than twenty Māori moving image artists will be on display at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in August.
Commentary
Curating Oceania
The idea for an exhibition of Oceanic art originated from the Royal Academy itself, proposed in 2012 by its then artistic director Kathleen Soriano, an Australian. The exhibition was imagined to fit within the Academy’s occasional programme of ‘civilisation’ or ‘world art’ exhibitions, inaugurated in 1996 with the ground-breaking Africa: Art of a Continent, and followed by exhibitions such as Aztecs (2002), China (2005), Byzantium (2009) and others. These exhibitions sat among the gallery’s more usual fare of historical European, modern and contemporary art.
Commentary
Te Āhua o te Hau ki te Papaioea
The ‘Operation 8’ anti-terror raids in October of 2007 were the culmination of a police investigation that led to the raiding of homes across New Zealand. The raids were conducted after an extended period of surveillance, which was enabled through use of the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act. In 2013 the Independent Police Conduct Authority found that police had “unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” people during the raids.
Interview
Looking at Forty Years of Māori Moving Image Practice
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive is co-curated by Bridget Reweti and Melanie Oliver. The following text is a conversation between the two curators around co-curating, archives and Māori moving image practice.
Commentary
Bringing the Soul
As an eleven-year-old boy from Whāngarei, sent to live in Yaldhurst with my aunt in the late seventies, Christchurch was a culture shock. Arriving in New Zealand’s quintessential ‘English city’, I remember well the wide landscapes and manicured colonial built environment. It was very pretty but also very monocultural, with no physical evidence of current or former Māori occupation or cultural presence, or at least none that I could appreciate at that time.
