Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter #162 i Art New Zealand

We live in a world full of stuff. Stuff enters our lives, and just as quickly departs-only to accumulate elsewhere. In an economy driven by supply and demand, artist Eve Armstrong questions what we decide to keep and what we throw away. Her work speaks to the life cycle of an object, and by interrupting its circulation she seeks to extend or add to an object’s ‘physical, as well as formal functionality’.1 With a practice encompassing sculpture, collage and performance, she collects, collates and creates assemblages using readily available materials. Her use of discarded objects is driven by a practical rather than environmental conscience, born out of a commitment to creating site-responsive work. The context within which she exhibits similarly informs her work, be it cultural, social or otherwise: ‘My…

It’s been a long time coming. After years of effort and planning, two major redevelopment proposals and much dissension, Nelson’s Suter Gallery has finally had the revamp it so sorely needed. I recall the gallery as feeling cramped, its reception area dark, pokey and unwelcoming, with short flights of steps linking but also limiting access to the various spaces. Behind-the-scenes facilities were less than adequate. Various additions and alterations over the years had solved some problems but inadvertently created others. The redevelopment faced several challenges. They included the need to incorporate the original 1899 Suter Gallery-a Category 2 listed heritage building and New Zealand’s oldest public gallery in continual use; retain the 1979 theatre, the proposed removal or reduction of which had proved a major sticking point in an earlier…

To some art audiences Emily Mafile’o is relatively unknown, but for others, including myself, she is revered as the first Tongan artist to be included in the Auckland Triennial.1 Since 1999, Mafile’o’s practice has traced aspects of Tongan culture, as it oscillates between Aotearoa and the homeland, producing multiple bodies of work in both the Kingdom of Tonga and in New Zealand. The personal becomes political, both in the intimacy of the photographer’s relationship with families, and in the network of family and friends she depicts to create a form of self-portrait. In some instances self-portraits of Mafile’o’s life have addressed thorny issues within contemporary Tongan experiences. A quick recap through her practice certainly supports this: the groundbreaking photographic series Tongan Youth Culture (2004) featured edgy images of family members…

Take a walk through Oamaru’s retail and business district today and Colin Vernon Wheeler’s paintings of the town announce their presence to almost every street corner and building. For more than 60 years, Wheeler lived and worked in Oamaru,1 initially as a painter and teacher from 1952 to 1969, and then as a full-time professional artist.2 Oamaru and the Waitaki district might appear to be the dedicated subject and reason for his work. The importance of the region for the artist was acknowledged on three public occasions, with Wheeler making significant accessions of his drawings and paintings to Forrester Gallery in 1984, 1986 and 1990. These encompassed the artist’s sheep station drawings for the three publications he wrote and illustrated for A.H. & A.W. Reed between 1968 and 1973;3 paintings…

Over the last couple of decades, Ross Ritchie has made pictures consistent with those he did early on in his career: appropriations of European art, enigmatic scenarios, loose gestural passages mixed with firm draughtsmanship. In between times, there were phases of pop, abstraction and even conceptualism. When Edward Hanfling visited the artist at his home in Birkenhead on Auckland’s North Shore, they had a free-flowing conversation about the process of making pictures, lessons learnt from painting billboards as well as from the works and philosophies of other artists, the more than 20 years Ritchie spent working at the Auckland City Art Gallery, and the way his psychological make-up feeds his art. Yet they both agreed, contrary to popular belief, that the experience of art itself is no conversation. Edward Hanfling:…

I met Yuki Kihara for the first time in Auckland, as part of a studio visit. The works that made up A Study of A Samoan Savage were hanging nicely on the walls, presented as part of our meeting, and she was soon to launch the project. I had been in New Zealand for only three weeks, and this was the moment that I literally realised where I had come to. Words, all written with a capital C-Capitalism, Colonialism and Class-were looping, echoing and turning around in my head while I was looking at those images, trying to read them with possible connections that might relate to my understanding of the new context in which I found myself. Kihara was very solid with her arguments, she was extremely generous with…

Aroha Gossage made her first art in Pakiri, 85 kilometres north of Auckland, where she grew up in a house nestled in the dunes. As a four-year-old she made life-sized sculptures of birds and figures out of Pakiri River’s clay and mud, working with her cousins and three older sisters. Pakiri has a broad surf beach-dredged to provide sand for Mission Bay in Auckland-and a sleepy valley where dense bush made way for dairy farms. It’s both physical and ancestral home for Gossage, a place steeped in the history of whanau, hapu, iwi and myth. One of those mud-building sisters, Star Gossage, became a role model: a successful Maori woman artist navigating the world of contemporary art. Her sister’s example of a life dedicated to creative practice was formative for…

Max Ernst, in 1936, explained the mechanism of collage in terms of a canoe finding itself in the presence of a vacuum cleaner. In an unexpected forest setting, the two items produce a ‘ready-made reality’ that embodies its own poetic truth; in the artist’s own words, this was ‘the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them’.1 The same intoxicating mix can be seen in the work of two Auckland artists, Teresa HR Lane and George Hajian who, with scissors and scalpel, create what Ernst would go on to describe as revealing dramas of his most secret desires, from what had before been only some banal pages of advertising.2 Hajian is a doctoral candidate at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland…

The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age of international exhibitions, beginning with London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. New Zealand was represented at that event-formally known as the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations-with a selection of raw materials and items made by Maori, and also took part in subsequent exhibitions at Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880). At the next major event, the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, this country sent the usual examples of natural resources, along with a large Maori collection and ‘works of art’. The latter, mainly paintings of natural scenery selected for their picturesque appeal and technical competence, were designed to attract tourists and new settlers, but at the same time they hinted…

Barry Lett, 40 Years at Auckland’s Pah Homestead was a welcome opportunity to catch up with this somewhat elusive and retiring artist. The excellent catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains illustrations of a selection of key works, from the artist’s first show until very recently. In interviews and reminiscences he gives intimate insights into his personal history, motivations and attitudes to art-making. The following article summarises his career. I have couched it in personal terms because Barry and I were born in the same year (1940) and our lives have certain parallels and intertwinings as far as art and conservation are concerned. In our teens we both had a yen to be artists. Barry trained as a teacher in Wellington and then moved on to study at Elam School of Fine…

Death is the great leveller. Nicola Jackson’s The Bloggs, a single room installation on the ground floor of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, is stuffed with reminders of death, with memento mori. The space feels claustrophobic: you are pressed up against the specimens within its tight confines, while the bilious liver-coloured walls seem to squeeze in on you, as if to make your flesh creep, your scalp prickle, your armpits sweat. Indeed, it only lacks an open coffin on a plinth in the centre of the room to make the surrealistic undertaker’s parlour atmosphere complete. One is put in mind of some imaginative child’s collection of out-of-control voodoo dolls, or of a Victorian freak show, or else of a needling collection of funerary sculpture salvaged from a vast swathe of…

Lane’s images are vessels for the projection of human memory and desire. They speak to people across national borders and across time zones, small islands of constancy floating in a vast global sea of equivocation.1 Tony Lane’s studio is located under a large golden elm and pohutukawa in his front garden. The long high-ceilinged room has French doors at either end and long blank walls facing the road and his house. The wall facing the house is serving as a gallery space and is hung with Lane’s latest series, provisionally entitled Infinities. In the warmth of the afternoon the studio smells of a painter’s tools: oil paint and linseed, with perhaps a hint of rabbit-skin glue, a key ingredient in traditional gesso. It is a curious aroma that hovers between…

Harry Culy’s interior photographs seem to have a preternatural temporal stillness. Empty rooms, a light-bulb suspended on a flex from a ceiling plane, vacant chairs, and an apparently casual arrangement of flowers, all become stark revelations captured in a stopped frame. But look everywhere and narratives are coiled and awaiting release from compression and silence. Culy’s photographs possess an implacable air of paused being, yet their effect is based on the presence of a hair-trigger tension. Time and stories loom on the other side of the shutter. Objects are placed significantly. A recent towel is draped over a door. Unknown import seeks unravelling. Culy, himself, is an apparent contradiction. Despite his interest in motionless moments, he is also a well-known participant in Wellington’s skateboard community. His boarding activities feature…

Nick Austin: Personal Address text by Nick Austin & Wystan Curnow Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland 2017 The epistolary format is a clever way of baking your cake and eating it too. It is at once old-fashioned, reminding the reader of texts that range from Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela to Helene Hanff’s chick-lit-before-there-was-such-a-thing 84 Charing Cross Road from 1970, while the widespread use of email in the twenty-first century allows it to seem modern and universal. The format offers the bonus of two subjective points of view, and does not rely on any omniscient narrator. It bears the impetus and immediacy of spoken conversation, yet enjoys the consideration of written prose. It is at once both private and public; it follows the passage of time, yet ignores its constraints; and…