Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2016 #159 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Alex Monteith Shadow V Gow Langsford Gallery, 15 June–2 July EDWARD HANFLING This is an odd one. I like Alex Monteith’s sensibility-her taste for speed and thrills and bigness and intensity, and the way she channels this into her art, making videos that capture those qualities with a sense of directness and duration. She does not (usually) get too poetic or precious. Monteith offers entertainment in a concentrated, rigorous form, without the narrative contrivances of popular entertainment-she gives it to you straight-whisky neat rather than sugary soft drink. But her most recent exhibition does strike me as having some unnecessary frills. It is not that there is a whole lot in the show. The pièce de résistance is unquestionably the large video projection with mirror images of…

On 30 March, the New Zealand public stamped out Prime Minister John Key’s campaign to change the New Zealand flag. On 2 November 1995, an installation at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki by Diane Prince (Ngati Whatua, Nga Puhi), which invited visitors to the gallery to trample on the flag, was removed from the exhibition Korurangi: New Maori Art after complaints to the police and the threat of legal action. Despite sharing a lack of enthusiasm for the British ensign, two more contrasting characters than Key and Prince would be hard to find: one a mega-rich money trader and popular neo-liberal politician; the other a Maori activist and artist. And while (failed flag referendum apart) Key is perplexingly popular, Prince’s artwork angered many, provoking copious complaints, letters to…

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night It takes a great deal of courage, determination, commitment and self-belief to pursue a lifelong artistic path that is often perceived as neither fashionable, conventional, nor always acceptable, but may in fact sometimes cause antagonistic or negative reactions. Fortunately, Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett’s resilience and her philosophy of the transforming power of the negative as an intrinsic part of the positive has resulted in an extensive exhibition, 15 years in the making, which opened in June at Parnell Gallery, Auckland. Lawlor-Bartlett, who proudly proclaims herself a socially engaged protest artist, learned early in her career that the political could have unwelcome repercussions. In 1953, in her final year at Elam School of Fine Arts, her…

Among the works in Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show at Auckland Art Gallery over the summer were six oils by Barbara Tuck. The brushwork was delicate and feathery, depicting islands of lush, plant-like form that seemed to drift, suspended in space, against a filmy blue-grey ground. The paintings obviously referenced the natural world but exactly what remained unclear-perhaps foliage, microscopic life, or a bird’s-eye view of the land. And were we looking up into space, or down, towards the earth? The square format reinforced the sense of spatial ambiguity, and it appeared that these works could be tilted upside down and still be perfectly convincing. Dreamy and mysterious, they were unlike anything else in the exhibition, and it was difficult to think of comparisons in recent painting practice.1 Many viewers…

Chester Nealie: Etched in Fire edited by Damian Skinner Ron Sang Publications, Auckland 2016 RIGEL SORZANO Chester Nealie was born in Rotorua in 1942, and began making pots in 1964. Based in Australia since the 1990s, he lives and works near Gulgong, a New South Wales gold-mining town notable for its community of wood-firing potters, and its international pottery events. For most of his career Nealie has focused primarily on anagama wood-firing, and his rich, crustaceous pots feature in public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Chester Nealie: Etched in Fire reflects on 50 years of work by this busy potter, bringing together extensive interviews with Nealie, essays from nine New Zealand and Australian contributors, numerous excellent images, and a thorough compilation of biographical and career notes.…

The door is half-open. I knock, and Jeffrey Harris appears down a narrow walkway in the otherwise completely full-up big space that is his main studio, in a former automotive workshop located near Dunedin’s old warehouse district. He leads the way through a warren of jumbled-up finished and half-finished paintings of all sizes, stacked or leaning, up the stairs to a small room at the end of the mezzanine that is his current painting studio. We begin talking about Renaissance Days, shown over summer at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and I ask about the impulse for the exhibition. Jeffrey Harris: Three of the paintings in the show were in an exhibition I had at the Brett McDowell Gallery in Dunedin in March 2013. Cam McCracken, the then new director…

‘You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with . . . a perfect organism-its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility‘, Alien, 1979 In Autumn of this year, Auckland Art Gallery announced Karekare-based artist Joyce Campbell would be a finalist for the 2016 Walters Prize, a biennial award considered to be New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art award. The jury selected Campbell’s Flightdream, a 25-minute-long high-definition video, as an outstanding contribution to contemporary art made in the last two years.1 Although the work has been exhibited in Australia twice in the past year it was chosen based on its initial installation, when it was simply projected in the intimate upper space of Newton dealer gallery Two Rooms, in the Spring of 2015. When questioned about the prize, Campbell extolled…

A private art collection, as curator Lauren Gutsell points out in her catalogue essay for light switch and conduit: the Jim and Mary Barr Collection, operates ‘on a different set of concerns’ to a collection institution that has civic responsibilities. It is a particular instance of the possible, based on what resonates emotionally with the collectors-their particular passions, discoveries and commissions-but also on what they can fit into their home. This exhibition, the third outing for the Barr Collection at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery following Good Work (2001) and Reboot (2006), showcases art acquired both when the Barrs were living in a big open-plan apartment in Wellington up until fairly recently, along with newer acquisitions following their move to a smaller inner-city apartment, also in Wellington. The Barrs established…

 Auckland-based photographer Joshua Montreal’s Bright Young Things series positions the personal as public, and the public as subtly, but inherently, political. In a collection of works documenting pairings of people within the artist’s own life, Montreal’s large format photographs consider human intimate connection within a generation defined by both the significant privilege and the uncertain outcome of its future. The title of the series imbues the work with the satirical, sardonic nature of the book Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, whose work fictionalised the history of the Bright Young Things, a group of London socialites active throughout the 1920s. Drawing from a narrative of young, ostentatious wealth, Montreal’s deadpan flatness questions the narrative of the contemporary young adult. Are they the next generation of success, or are they living a…

Exuberant, multi-layered, mercurial, this Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre-originated show is a sight to behold. The only disappointment about Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph is that it will not tour. The collective energy at the New Plymouth location deserves a greater wandering. As a child, my universe was slowly deconstructed. Through science experiments and through logic, the mysteries of the cosmos could be explained. But this did not mean magic was lost-instead, the invisible materialised and the microscopic became gigantic. Emanations is this sense of wonder manifest, sometimes playful, at other times foreboding. Curated by Geoffrey Batchen, noted international photographic historian and Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, with significant curatorial assistance from the Govett-Brewster’s Paul Brobbel and Sarah Wall, the show is the most…

Both Christchurch Art Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery are celebrating Doris Lusk. Two small ‘focus’ shows-presented during the centennial year of the artist’s birth, in acknowledgement of her significant contribution to New Zealand modernism-offer a new generation, and those unfamiliar with the breadth of her output, an opportunity to experience the vitality of her work, to see crucial changes in approach, and to track shifts in media.1 In Christchurch, the emphasis-a revelation to many-is the originality, technical innovations, toughness, and topicality of her Constructed Demolition series (1979–82). In addition to the paintings displayed in Dunedin, examples of Lusk’s earthenware acknowledge her early introduction to clay in the late 1930s. Following marriage and a move to Christchurch in the early ’40s, Lusk’s world expanded. She taught pottery at Risingholme Community…

In late 2015 Tate Britain went boldly where none had gone before, and opened what director Nicholas Serota identified as ‘the first large-scale presentation of the art made in response to the British Empire’. Further, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (25 November 2015–10 April 2016) was an exhibition the Tate was ‘uniquely placed to stage’. Focusing on works of art in British collections, it aimed to trace the influence of Empire since the sixteenth century, an undertaking that was considered ‘timely, if not overdue’.1 As might be expected, New Zealand (a colony from 1840 until graduating to a self-governing dominion in 1907) was represented, by works produced both by the colonisers and the colonised. This was, of course, the view of the Mother Country, which begs the question…