Solomon Mortimer Donavon Pinkerton #1 2013. Pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
Andrew Beck Red cutting through black 2016. Acrylic, enamel, silver gelatin prints, conservation glass in artist frames. Courtesy of Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
Conor Clarke Twin Peaks, Berlin 2014. C-print. Collection of the artist, Courtesy of Two Rooms, Auckland
19 November 2016 – 12 March 2017
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Christchurch Art Gallery has a long tradition of curating exhibitions by emerging and early-career artists. The Devil’s Blind Spot concentrates on recent photography by New Zealand artists born in the 1980s and 1990s, who have grown up in the digital realm. Today we’re immersed in a constant stream of digital images; with a smartphone in your pocket, taking a photograph and sharing it with friends and strangers across the world is only a click away. This exhibition asks how a younger generation of artists is responding to the new cultural conditions of photography.
Includes work by Andrew Beck, Holly Best, Jordana Bragg, Conor Clarke, Chris Corson-Scott, Solomon Mortimer, Ane Tonga, Shaun Waugh, and Rainer Weston.
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Location:
Touring Gallery A W.A. Sutton Gallery -
Curator:
Lara Strongman -
Exhibition number:
1021 -
Contemporary Art Partner
Related reading: Maori, Photography, Pasifika, Kai Tahu, EY
Exhibition
Ansel Adams: Photographic Frontiers
29 January 2006
Legendary American photographer Ansel Adams' images of the natural world reveal a lifetime devoted to capturing its changing beauty. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs the artist considered his best.
Exhibition
George D. Valentine. A Nineteenth Century photographer in New Zealand
27 June 2004
An absorbing journey through the works of a nineteenth-century photographer.
My Favourite
Ane Tonga's Seta
There’s a moment in my play Black Faggot when a gay Samoan man describes the moment he sees ‘this fine chocolate piece of mmmmmm’ on the dancefloor at a nightclub.
‘…he looked over at me and then he smiled and then I was like, Damn, he’s a Tongan. He had a mouthful of gold in there…’
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.
Collection
David Cook New Zealand vs British Lions, Lancaster Park, Christchurch
On 4 June 1983, the British Lions beat New Zealand at Lancaster Park by 16 points to 12.
Collection
Anne Noble Mouth (Ruby’s Room)
For the exhibition I See Red (5 December 2007 - 23 November 2008) this work was displayed with the following label: Red can be in-your-face and attention-seeking, and the attention red wants, red gets. Anne Noble’s enormous, cheeky photograph Mouth (Ruby’s Room) gives more than an eyeful of her daughter Ruby’s protruding tongue and chewing gum.
Q. What red sound would this artwork make? A. A giant raspberry!
Collection
Glenn Busch Man at an outdoor cafe
Throughout his career Glenn Busch has been drawn to photographing people. The first contemporary photographs acquired for the Gallery’s collection were a portfolio of five portraits by Busch, including this one, in 1974. At the time, Busch was at the forefront of contemporary photography in New Zealand, not only as a practitioner but also as a promoter. The following year he co-founded Snaps – A Photographer’s Gallery in Auckland, which did much to promote contemporary New Zealand photography. (1969 Comeback Special 27 August – 6 November 2016)
Notes
Your Hotel Brain
This week we've been installing a new collection exhibition, Your Hotel Brain. It replaces curator Ken Hall's elegant meditation on architecture and memory, Above Ground, in the contemporary collection galleries.
Exhibition
Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography
Uncovering the remarkable, largely unseen work of early New Zealand photographers.
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.
Exhibition
Ann Shelton: Dark Matter
An expansive view of Ann Shelton’s tightly conceived, large scale and hyperreal photography
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.’
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.
Exhibition
Aberhart Starts Here
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
Exhibition
Te Tihi o Kahukura: The Citadel of Kahukura
Selected works by Bill Sutton considered from a Kāi Tahu perspective.
Exhibition
Shannon Te Ao: Tēnei Ao Kawa Nei
Tenderness and human longing are revealed in Shannon Te Ao’s award-winning video installations.
Exhibition
Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs
Exquisitely imagined, startlingly strange works by an internationally acclaimed New Zealand artist.
Exhibition
Energies: Haines & Hinterding
See, hear, smell and feel the invisible energies that surround us as Australian artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding summon unseen forces.
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.
Exhibition
Ship Songs
A small but poetic exhibition looking at early European and Māori representations of seafaring vessels, with the Charlotte Jane as a focal point.
Exhibition
Kōwhaiwhai
Five significant works of art that look to traditional Māori architecture to inform modernist and contemporary Māori art practice.
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
Exhibition
Joyce Campbell: Flightdream
Joyce Campbell’s immersive video work takes the viewer on a journey into the ocean’s fathomless depths, exploring processes of creation and annihilation.
Exhibition
Great Britten! A work by Billy Apple
Billy Apple blurs the line between life and art with a new installation that celebrates the triumphant, record-shattering 1995 campaign of the Christchurch-designed Britten V1000 motorbike.
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.
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.
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Exhibition
Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
Laurence Aberhart's 1983 photograph of Lyttelton children is displayed on our Gloucester Street billboard.
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.
Commentary
A Perspective on Pacific Art in Christchurch
Pacific art is one of the more internationally successful and innovative sectors of New Zealand’s art industry, but Pacific artists in Ōtautahi have struggled to be a visible part of the city’s cultural landscape. Due to our small population and distance from the Pacific art capital that is Auckland, our artists have often developed in relative isolation, relying on our Pasifika arts community to maintain a sense of cultural vitality, belonging and place within the city.
Exhibition
Beasts
A generous, multimedia selection of animal-themed works, both lively and thoughtful.
Exhibition
Ata Wairere
Contemporary works that create subtle openings for connection and contemplation.
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.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart: Nature Morte
Nature Morte is an exhibition of 105 photographs, taken between 1971 and 1989 by New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart.