B.190
ISBN: 1176-0540
Magazine
In this edition of Bulletin we hear from Lana Lopesi, who looks at the burden of expectation on Jacqueline Fahey’s work. Fahey was one of the first New Zealand artists to paint from a women’s perspective, making paintings which challenged accepted archetypes of female experience and what were ‘appropriate’ subjects for art. Lopesi asks how we might look at contemporary feminist art practice within Aotearoa New Zealand today. And Robyn Maree Pickens examines the ways that photographic artist Ann Shelton represents women through their absence. Operating where documentary and conceptual photography meet, Shelton counters the objectification of women by showing us the dark matter of marginalised female lives.
As an acceptance of the realities of anthropogenic climate change enters our political dialogue, Amy Howden Chapman and Abby Cunnane survey the language currently surrounding it. With a series from their continuing Distance Plan project, they offer a lexicon intended to encourage reasoned discussion and action about the ways we are altering our environment. And Lara Strongman offers us a window into the thinking and motivations of five of the artists featured in Your Hotel Brain. Pagework comes from Christchurch artist Melissa Macleod, who highlights the concerns of residents in this city’s eastern suburbs; and My Favourite comes from landscape architect Megan Wraight, who picks a painting by Olivia Spencer Bower with a family connection.
Pages: 64
Dimensions: 265 x 215mm
Imprint: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
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Exhibition
Jacqueline Fahey: Say Something!
11 March 2018
Overflowing with love, conflict and quiet despair, Fahey’s paintings from the 1970s bristle with the intensity of domestic life.
Exhibition
Ann Shelton: Dark Matter
15 April 2018
An expansive view of Ann Shelton’s tightly conceived, large scale and hyperreal photography
Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
As I write this, I’m still smiling with pleasure and pride at the huge success of the Gallery Foundation’s fundraising drive for our own work by Ron Mueck. Wonderful in its own right, it’s amazing to finish the 2017 calendar year knowing a sculpture by Mueck is now on its way to join the other four ‘great works’ for Christchurch.
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.
Commentary
An Undeniable Promise
There is such a burden of expectation placed on Anne’s painting, and on the exhibition… itself. I feel, like many women painters that she is being asked to prove an undeniable promise. This is unfair.
My Favourite
Olivia Spencer Bower's Menzies Bay
This work of art paints connections for me – to people, to this landscape and this place. My great-great-grandparents John Henry Menzies and Francis Elizabeth Menzies settled here in the 1870s. I was intrigued to discover that, way back then, the Christchurch parochial attitude was already well established. When he purchased the land John Henry encountered difficulty at the land office; he wrote, ‘A map was the first step. I was a stranger. You must not, even now be a stranger in Canterbury. Not one of the clerks would take any notice of me. It was entirely a case of favouritism.’
Commentary
Raiding the Minibar
When does history start? What is the time span of the present? When do the margins of the contemporary begin to dissolve into the past? Our collection-based exhibition, Your Hotel Brain, looks at a group of New Zealand artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. Collectively their work explores ideas that have been critical to art-making in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past twenty years. Identity politics, unreliable autobiographies and references to a broad spectrum of visual culture – including Black Sabbath’s music, prison tattoos, automotive burn-outs and our no-smoking legislation – traverse the contested ground of recent New Zealand art, linking the just-past with the emerging present. A selection of works from the exhibition are reproduced here.
Interview
The London Club
In September 2017, Gallery director Jenny Harper, curator Felicity Milburn and Jo Blair, of the Gallery Foundation’s contracted development services, Brown Bread, went to London, taking a group of supporters who received a very special tour of the city’s art highlights. While there, they further developed the Foundation’s new London Club. Recently they sat down together in Jenny’s office…
Commentary
Shigeyuki Kihara
Behind the work of Auckland-based artist Shigeyuki Kihara lies a vigorous research ethic that falls into complex alignment with her cultural, political and gender identities.
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.