Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Billy McQueen Archive 02 Föenander Gallery 5–25 March KYLA MACKENZIE This, Billy McQueen’s third solo exhibition, stems from his family archive of photographs and follows on from Archive at Antoinette Godkin Gallery in 2018. McQueen (Ngati Manawa), a former print technician, graduated in 2015 with a MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. With the memory of printmaking, he developed a cohesive, distinctive muted palette, a tendency towards textured, layered surfaces, indeterminate figuration, and abstract imagery. This show signals McQueen’s move towards a brighter palette and greater viscosity. Pale paintings like L.McGreggor reflect his earlier use of muted tones, while in several other canvases thickly applied heightened colour literally overlaps this earlier, more sparing impulse. The artist’s subjects do not just serve as pictorial armature for plastic…

We (I say presumptuously on behalf of those who take a keen interest in contemporary art) expect to be surprised, not see the same thing over and over. Yet sometimes we go to an exhibition by a particular artist precisely because we dimly expect to get the same thrill we got last time we saw their work. I confess to being disappointed at the first sight of Yona Lee’s new show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG), an outcome of the Visiting Artist Programme the gallery runs in conjunction with the Dunedin School of Art. I knew, and liked, her previous work, such as the In Transit (Arrival) installation she put together for Te Tuhi in 2017, and looked forward to the arrival of a similar and new manifestation…

Gary Silipa Kenese Mangere Arts Centre Nga Tohu o Uenuku 21 February–4 April As I write this, Aotearoa New Zealand sits in lockdown. We are all nestled behind our closed doors only allowed to venture outside for walks, supermarket visits and to access other essential services such as pharmacies. Our galleries and museums slowly closed one by one as they complied with government instructions; when the lockdown commenced at 11.59pm on Wednesday 25 March they had all shut their doors. With us unable to see art in real life until further notice, it surely feels like both an end and a start of something. What exactly? We have no idea just yet. Much like the art which serendipitously was exhibited when Trump was elected President of the United States, or…

We Learnt to See: Elam’s Rutland Group 1935–1958: A Biographical Journey with Auckland Artists, Puriri Press, Auckland 2004, p. 423; and information kindly provided by Kyla Mackenzie. 34. Tom Bolster, ‘Show Points a Way for New Zealand Painters’, Auckland Star, 2 October 1951. 35. Gordon H. Brown, op. cit., p. 63; John Bell, Auckland Star, 28 May 1951, quoted in Brown, p. 63. 36. Gordon H. Brown, op. cit., p. 61. 37. ‘No Bledisloe Medal’, Arts in New Zealand, vol. 17, no. 4, June–July 1945, p. 48. 38. Remarks by Dr J.C. Beaglehole, at opening of the September 1957 exhibition of John and Charles Tole at Architectural Centre Gallery, Wellington, Charles Tole artist’s file, E.H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. 39. John and Charles Tole, in…

Séraphine Pick’s paintings represent heightened states of consciousness and uneasy conditions of unconsciousness. The overriding impression is one of transformation. She translates the experiences of revellers and ravers―intoxicated, euphoric, mesmerised―and of intrepid explorers of technologically enhanced landscapes and forms of communication. Her own work can be characterised in terms of rapid changes, between different styles and structures, and unsettling disruptions, exerted on images and on the sensibilities of viewers. Pick studied at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, graduating in 1987, and gained recognition initially for her ‘white paintings’ of the 1990s, with floating images of fragmentary memories. Increasingly intricately surreal dreamscapes followed, but Pick has also, since the early 2000s, worked with source images that evince the weirdness of everyday realities, or at least of the mediated…

Ruth Buchanan The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 7 December 2019–29 March The exhibition The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong marked the 50th anniversary of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Commissioned by recently arrived directors Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Berlin-based artist Ruth Buchanan (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) used the opportunity to build on her previous solo exhibition at the gallery, The actual and its document (10 September–4 December 2016), delving more deeply into the institution’s collecting history of the past 50 years. Buchanan selected a massive 273 works from the Govett-Brewster collection, grouping them into the decades in which they were bought and installing each of these across the five…

Eucalyptus and lemon myrtle burned. Brendan Kerin, a representative of Redfern’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, expertly fed leaves and branches into a steel bucket. As each handful of specially gathered material was consumed by fire, the smoke increased until it was billowing and voluminous. Continuous swells of fragrant smoke grew and grew until they swallowed up the gathered crowd, filling our lungs and permeating our clothes. This smoking ceremony, Kerin explained, was like ‘a shower for your insides’, the idea was that it would cleanse the visitors and their surroundings of ‘bad history’. Indeed, our location, Sydney Harbour’s Cockatoo Island, set up as a convict penal colony in 1839, is a site where mass transportation and forced labour is visibly evident in architectural and industrial remains. Yet in the…

A unique feature of mid-twentieth-century New Zealand painting was the contribution by two Auckland brothers, John and Charles Tole. The pair, who had no formal training and who lived together and painted similar subjects in similar styles, have been hailed as ‘hardy souls’ who ‘kept the flag of painting flying through some very lean years for New Zealand art’.1 The Toles ably illustrated the challenges faced by local artists, such as dealing with overseas developments—cubism in particular—which were necessarily absorbed through second-hand sources. A major influence on the pair was fellow Auckland artist John Weeks (1888–1965), leading to what Avenal McKinnon has described as a ‘Weeksian aura of filtered Cubism’ in their work.2 Weeks encouraged their interest in urban and industrial landscapes, and the Toles were among a number of…

Sappho’s poems have come down to us from Greek literature as teasing fragments, her verses only preserved for posterity through being quoted in classical texts by other authors, or else unearthed as stray lines and phrases on shards of pottery and pieces of papyrus from archaeological digs. With their glimpses of rapture and yearning, their lyrical imagery, and their assertive themes of relationships and friendships between women, Sappho’s recovered writings―the Sapphic fragments―have become canonical in women’s studies, feminist politics and queer theory. Aucklander Imogen Taylor―who has established a reputation as a riot grrrl, one able to produce witty comix and to wrangle paint with adroit flair and deadpan comedy―was awarded the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University, and Sapphic Fragments marked the end of her Fellowship year. In this…

Milli Jannides’ recent exhibition, Sympathy Activity at Mossman, Wellington, is a dissonant collection of works painted over the course of 2019 from the artist’s base in Portugal. Across 14 variously sized paintings, intensity rises and mutes, colours and surfaces shift, matte opacity appears against faintly shiny ridges of oil paint. To view the show collectively impels questioning of logic and meanings, sources and references. Most of all, we are drawn in by the idiosyncrasies of each work, into the individual world it opens. Given the unravelling of a global pandemic, the idea of being physically in an art exhibition feels remote at present. Our modes of viewing are certainly different. The uncertainties extending from this meet with something latent in Sympathy Activity. A strange breadth in the show is evident…

It is my first encounter with Richard Orjis’ Queer Pavilion. The grass in Rangipuke Albert Park is achingly dry, but the flowerbeds are hallucinatory, resplendent with colour, thanks to the university gardeners. It’s 9am, and Richard is knotting the rope to hold the Tino Rangitiratanga flag to a tree. Across from it, the Pride flag flies in rhythm. Richard has been attending to the entangled political movements of Maori and queer activism, particularly as they have emerged through stratas of time and place in Rangipuke, for a good long time now. Over the past years his art practices here have become touchstones in my almost-daily visits through the park. As I wander past the magnolias, the fountain, the statue of Queen Victoria, my mind drifts to memories of walking in…

There are many layers that make up someone’s totality: DNA; the cumulative experiences over a lifetime, shaped by both internal and external realities and imaginings; the structures and limitations in which we find ourselves, and are difficult to break out of. Ehsan Hazaveh’s My Life To Live documents these layers through the upheaval and respite of refugee background workers’ lives. Aspirational yet grounded in the everyday, the project considers the challenges of low-wage employment and the difference a living wage could make to those confronting many obstacles. Independent Iranian photographer Hazaveh uses two different forms of narrative―the photographic and the written―to document the lives of six workers from refugee backgrounds: South Sudan, Myanmar, the Assyrian community in Iraq, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Colombia. The photographs are accompanied by first-person reflections about…