Art New Zealand Winter 2019

Bill Culbert, ‘Master of Light’, died aged 84 on the 28th of March this year at his home in the hamlet of Croagnes in the Vaucluse region of Provence. His daughter Colette phoned to say he was cremated wearing his classic blue cotton cap with a little Cuban flag (gifted to him by Ralph Hotere in Cuba) and with a piece of pounamu in his pocket. He was also sporting one of the jaunty shirts that he loved and that many will remember him wearing on occasions when others believed more formal attire was appropriate. What Bill believed to be appropriate was usually at jaunty odds with convention. Colette and his son Rae were with him when he died―his wife the artist Pip Culbert died in 2016, and their son…

Auckland BC Collective, Louisa Afoa & Edith Amituanai Layover Artspace Aotearoa, 15 March–21 May IOANA GORDON-SMITH The travel term ‘layover’ describes a stopover, a pause in a journey with a defined departure and destination. Also the title of an exhibition at Artspace, Layover might similarly be seen as a mid-point, functioning as the second iteration of a three-part project. Developed by a group of five curators (Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka), Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash, Chicana), Léuli Eshraghi (Samoa, Iranzamin, Guangdong), Tarah Hogue (Métis, Dutch) and Lana Lopesi (Samoa)), The Layover continues on from The Commute (2018) at IMA Brisbane and precedes the scheduled Transits and Returns at Vancouver in 2019. With such a strong transnational and collaborative approach, Layover is susceptible to being subsumed by…

GALLERY I was in Auckland on a warm weekend in March to see Philippa Blair’s exhibition Counter-flow at Orexart, and to interview the artist. For more than a decade, Philippa Blair was a familiar name in the New Zealand art world, from the break-out Mellow Yellow show at New Vision Gallery in 1975, to the paint-splattered loose canvases of the 1980s, inventively turned into mats, cloaks and tents inspired by Native American art. Then she moved to California. The paintings changed, the career flourished, but back here we saw less. The Orexart exhibition, however, covers work of the last four years, since she returned to Auckland to live. I met Philippa at the gallery, in Arch Hill, on the Saturday afternoon; the paintings beamed with light and colour (especially the…

A little-known Parsi legend relates that an ancient textile fragment torn from a girl’s dress, and found centuries later embedded in the crevice of a mountainside in the Iranian province of Yazd, belonged to Banu Pars, daughter of the last Sassanian King of Persia, who was separated from her family during the Islamic invasion of 651 AD. Banu Pars fled, alone and on foot, disguised in the clothes of a commoner. Without food or water, and certain that she would perish, the Princess prayed for help, and her prayers were answered, not by Dadar Ahura Mazda, the supreme God of Zoroastrianism, but by Anahita, the goddess of fertility, who conjured a stream from the young girl’s tears to quench her thirst and parted the barren mountainside to reveal a verdant…

It has been commonplace for some time to see making art as a form of research. Artists work in tertiary institutions and collect PBRF (Performance Based Research Funding) points. But Aucklander Louise Menzies really is the most conscientious of artist-researchers. Her research is deep and detailed, and she brings to light what would otherwise remain obscure or invisible. She has signed off from her residency in Dunedin as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in admirably geekish style, with an exhibition at the Hocken Library that reveals the extent to which she has made use of that institution’s seemingly bottomless collections. This is not to say that the exhibition is an encyclopaedic record of Menzies’ research, or that we wade through masses of information. Rather, it is a sparse, distilled summary: at…

From The Attributes of a Marijuana Smoker (1975) to Commemoration (It was 70 Years Ago Today) (2017) featuring the drum from the famous cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Michael Shepherd’s engrossing exhibition Reinventing History Painting covers more than four decades of his distinctive and distinguished practice. Ably curated by Elizabeth Rankin, who also wrote the text for the indispensable catalogue,1 the exhibition includes 112 works (if series such as five Fiscal Envelopes and eight Dead Letter Mails are counted separately). It is a show that takes time to absorb, given the invariably subtle and layered character of Shepherd’s method. A single visit left me with strong impressions but also the frustration of not having been able to give each work the attention it deserves. Despite…