Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i Art New Zealand

Playing on the values suggested by her own name, Ayesha Green (Ngati Kahungunu, Kai Tahu), in her exhibition Wrapped up in Clouds at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, offers a suite of artwork—paintings, ceramics, drawings—that, together, evoke a kind of New Zealand-centred dreamscape. It is one that is made up of fragmentary quotations and visual echoes from canonical works of nationhood, interwoven with a personal narrative. The kaupapa of her show expresses, then, in oblique fashion, a credo: belief in an archipelago situated in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa that is primal, pristine, folkloric. It is indeed a place wrapped up in clouds, an atmosphere as much as a location. Here, the art-historical landscape of the Romantic Sublime has been tamed and domesticated into wryly romantic scenarios and smartly designed decor. In these depictions,…

EMMA BUGDEN Occasionally you can walk into an exhibition and think, ‘This is it’. This is the moment the various strands in an artist’s career come together; the ideas and techniques coalesce into a resounding and powerful statement. I’ve been waiting for that show from Andrea du Chatenier. Some artists begin their careers at a sprint but du Chatenier’s has felt more like a cross-country run. After studying jewellery and textiles at Waikato Polytechnic, she undertook a sculpture degree in the early 1990s at Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1995. Appearing in group shows in Auckland and regionally, she began to teach at Unitec in 1996, going on to become a full-time lecturer across art and design. For the next 20 years du Chatenier took a pluralistic approach…

MARY MACPHERSON The word ‘photobook’ clicks together like a well-designed jigsaw piece, but speak it out loud to an unsuspecting person and I often feel there is a pause where I am expected to add something—books by photographers, books that tell their story through photographs? Both are inadequate descriptions so lately I have tried to steel myself to ride the pause. For photographers, photobook is a word full of promise, conjuring a long history of publications. It means a book that dwells between novel and film, where you are telling a narrative, digging into a theme or maybe challenging the way photography or the book medium work. Photobooks travel the globe and they are where much of the history of photography resides and where many photographers discover their influences and…

Peter Roche lost his battle with lung cancer on 24 July 2020, leaving behind a life’s work of sculptures, drawings, videos and photographic documentation. Mourners were able to get a sense of the literally electrifying environment he had created for himself at the funeral held in the Ambassador Theatre in Point Chevalier, where the artist had lived since he purchased the derelict Art Deco cinema in 1996. Having only sporadic contact with Roche since the 1990s, this was a life I only knew through hearsay. I understood it to be one dominated by his consuming passion as an artist to work with light and motion, transforming physical energy into the material forms of his kinetic, fluorescent and neon installations, merged with a parallel existence as a mentor and magnet for…

MICHAEL DUNN Dark, mysterious and full of atmospheric effects of fire, haze, mist and vapour, the new paintings of Garry Currin have a compelling presence that draws the gaze and engages the mind. As a mature painter in his sixties who has a long exhibition history behind him, Garry Currin builds on his previous work in This Earth, his latest show at Auckland’s Whitespace, consolidating it rather than embarking on anything totally new. His style is established and his paintings have been shown at venues throughout the country in regional as well as the main centres. He paints in the traditional genre of landscape, once the primary art form in New Zealand and still a prominent feature of contemporary practice. Yet he has not been included in the main books…

month after what can be described as an aeonic period of research and cultivation. While other publishing about Apple has been substantial, crucial even, Barton’s task was to create something of a straight and sequential story on the artist (born Barrie Bates in Auckland in 1935), from beginning to ‘end’ (the artist still being active in his eighties). At some 400 pages this handsomely designed volume comes with clearly defined chapter demarcations, substantial footnotes supporting the text, an exhibition history covering periods of which there has been scant public record, a detailed and categorised bibliography, archival records, and collected works. Yet curiously, the subject of Apple has not been exhausted. As outlined in her preface, Barton’s active working relationship with Apple began around 2002. It is a strange effect of…

Auckland The 29th Annual Wallace Art Awards Pah Homestead, 15 September–15 November WARWICK BROWN Winners at the Wallace Art Awards would normally receive an overseas residency; these were suspended this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead there was a range of ten cash awards totalling $132,000. Held as usual at the Pah Homestead, the traditional crowded opening function also had to be a more restricted affair. The exhibition of finalists and the salon des refusés comprised more than 70 works. The emphasis was on originality and style, with all eligible media represented. Nineteen artists from last year made the cut again, a sign of the popularity of the Award and the consistency of the judging, undertaken in 2020 by five artists who were all former Paramount Award winners. Every…

EDWARD HANFLING You can tell straight off the bat that Pete Wheeler is serious about painting. But is he serious about what he paints? Back in 2007, Wheeler made a picture called Everytime I show I put my ass on the line. It has got all the ingredients of a bad album cover for a lame band of self-styled rebels—above all, a skull, that great, gothic, doom-laden emblem, beloved by the Romantics (Lord Byron drinking wine from the skull of a monk, and all that stuff). There is also a harlequin diamond pattern; to the right, a slum tenement (perhaps); below, the phrase ‘what the hell’ (no question mark); and the whole surface of the work looks like it is bleeding. Its title (‘everytime’ is not a proper word) speaks…

DON ABBOTT In 2021 Auckland Art Fair hosts a new set of Projects, a curated series of artworks by young and emerging practitioners. Australian writer and curator Michael Do has invited three artists to contribute to a programme called Present Tense. His brief is succinct yet full of potential. Do writes, ‘drawing upon the concept of gifting and exchange, this project will commission artists to create endless copies of an object to be given away to audiences at The Cloud’. In the times of a pandemic such a brief is both subversive and comforting; we have been encouraged to believe that the sharing of common goods equates to, at worst, the prospect of death (my dentist removed both TIME and The Economist from her waiting room). Do’s brief is a—thankfully…

In 1920 a wooden carving unlike any other was discovered in the Far North of New Zealand. Unearthed during drain operations across what had been Lake Tangonge, an early Maori settlement site at Pukepoto, southwest of Kaitaia,1 the carving was recognised as ‘something out of the ordinary’.2 Presumed to be ancient and perhaps of ‘pre-Maori age’, it was the subject of various theories, among them that it had Mongolian or Melanesian origins.3 It was discovered by Muru Hori Walters, also known as William Worth, on land owned by Joseph C. Clark, who subsequently sold it to the Auckland Museum.4 That institution considered it the most important acquisition for the year 1921–22, and no wooden object found in New Zealand offered ‘so many problems for discussion’ as this one, now referred…