Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Art New Zealand

On Courtenay Place, sun-bleached and heaving with people, the wind is arrested by silver nitrate and held static under glass. There are eight double-sided monoliths spaced along the walkway, from which the past regards us with a neutral eye; looking down at people waiting in line at the former-public-toilet-turned-pizza-place or sprawled on inhospitable street furniture. In time is the longest distance, an exhibition by photographer Camus Wyatt, the figures flanking Courtenay Place are larger than life, but not so large as to dwarf the viewer. For these images Wyatt selected images from the Alexander Turnbull Library, and scanned segments of them, later patching these segments together, and placing them in lightboxes along the central Wellington thoroughfare. The people in these photographs look at us the same way that we look…

Kate Newby YES TOMORROW Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Wellington 20 February–30 May There is a photograph of a slightly crumpled piece of paper with ‘YES TOMORROW’ written on it in upper case with a red marker pen. It is being held up against a bright blue sky. The hero image of Kate Newby’s exhibition introduces her title and, like many of her previous works, appears to draw from found language. In the face of circumstances or a hesitancy to which these two words might be responding, the image signals a restlessness, optimism—and a kind of ambition—that reverberates throughout her solo show at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi. Filling all three levels of the gallery building and extending into its surroundings, YES TOMORROW samples from more than…

At the peak of Freda Simmonds’ career in 1971, a short summary and black-and-white reproduction of her early cubist-informed Northland Landscape (1957–58) featured in Gil Docking’s Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting. Yet, despite her productivity and rapid progress by the 1950s, little has been written about her biography and career. Amidst struggles, sadness, as well as elation and perseverance, she was recognised as a serious painter of merit and accordingly supported by key figures in Auckland’s art scene. She lived about half her life in Tai Tokerau Northland with her husband and three children. Her extraordinary local environment was the catalyst for her often lyrical, abstracted oeuvre that spanned roughly three decades. Her themes, frequently mingled, were primarily the coastal environment of the Aupōuri peninsular, including Pārengarenga harbour…

In a career that spans three decades and divided equally between the UK and Aotearoa, Rosanna Raymond (b.1967) continues to gain international acclaim for her acti.VĀ.tions, performances, research, poetry, artistic and curatorial practice. We met in her studio named ‘Ana Pekapeka’ (bat cave), a place that hosts many an artist or cultural practitioner and what she describes as ‘a refuge where art and life converge, and activism is played out through everyday (sometimes mundane) actions’. This kind of dynamism is akin to the gravitational pull of the Pacific Sisters, a collective of which she is a founding member, as well as The SaVAge K’lub which she founded in 2010; both pursue the formation and transformation of communities and urban spaces in Aotearoa and internationally. During this talanoa, we are surrounded…

The birth of TOKI Hye Rim Lee’s TOKI is a twenty-first-century creation. TOKI was conceived in 2001 and revealed in 2002 in Hello TOKI ;) at the Moving Image Centre in Auckland. Her debut form, in Lee’s final year of art school, was in a video installation as a computer-manipulated character of a human actor costumed in a bunny-eared headdress. The following year she reappeared in a series of nine digital prints for The Birth of TOKI: hundreds and thousands at Auckland’s Starkwhite. A riff on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, the nine head-shot portraits of TOKI are perhaps her real debut as a fully digital entity. In Lee’s words, the portraits suggest ‘9 traits of personality, or 9 stages of the conception of birth. Through the process of rendering…

It is important, I think, to lean into the fact that this exhibition requires a content warning. That is to say that photographs of memorials dedicated to the ‘heroes’ of colonisation, and its genocidal acts, are contained within. The exhibition A Vocabulary lays bare words, memories and names of those whose actions are still raw on the skin of our whenua, sharp on the tongues of lost language and continue to rip through the lives of tangata whenua. From 5 December 2020 to 14 February 2021 Bruce Connew’s photographs held a prominent space at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery. A Vocabulary was both photographic show and book (of the same name) by Bruce Connew (Vapour Momenta Books, 2021). Designed by Catherine Griffiths, this publication houses a commissioned piece of writing…

In the opinion of a reviewer of the Canterbury Society of Arts’ 1888 exhibition, one work that stood out was a watercolour, Marguerites. Executed with ‘consummate skill’ and ‘admirably wrought throughout’, this flower study was ‘not only beyond comparison superior to any work of the kind here’ but ‘on an altogether higher plane of art’.1 It was the work of Dunedin artist Isabel Hodgkins, who later that same year received an award from the jurors for another watercolour shown at the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition. Her painting career flourished until the end of the century, but by then had been overtaken by the demands of marriage to lawyer William Field, motherhood and a busy social life. She may have been unable to realise her full potential as an artist, but that…

Brett Graham Tai Moana Tai Tangata Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 5 December 2020–2 May 2021, curated by Anna-Marie White Tai Moana Tai Tangata, a sculptural installation by Brett Graham, opened at the Govett-Brewster last December and proved to be something of a local art-world event, the ‘must see’ exhibition of 2020 and 2021. Motivated by social media, word of mouth and early reviews, streams of visitors—curators, gallerists, writers, art lovers of all kinds—made the journey to New Plymouth to see it. Evidently, it touched something. But what exactly? And why? And why at this moment in time? The show opened the same weekend as the Auckland Art Gallery’s Toi Tū Toi Ora, a survey show of the contemporary Māori art movement from the 1950s to the present. But in…

Rosebank Road is a place of enterprise and purpose. Trucks roll endlessly along the snaking tarmac strip, hauling materials and goods to warehouses, factories and ports. Bakeries and lunch bars are dotted amongst the workshops, serving low-key fare to the endlessly active workers who occupy the area by day. This industrial zone occupies most of a peninsula that juts out from Avondale, Auckland, between the Whau river and the inner reaches of the Waitematā harbour. This is perhaps an unusual environment for an exhibition of paintings and artworks. Nevertheless, such an exhibition took place in March. Nestled between a steel fabricator, an electrical engineering business and a nutritional product enterprise is a repurposed industrial workspace—once an offset printing facility, now the studio of senior painter Stephen Bambury. The exhibition, titled…

Lockdown 2020—that strange and restricted time—has turned out to have a few benefits. There is the discovery that we like working from home, that a whole lot of art is available online, and for some artists, the gift of time. For Jane Wilcox, Technical Services Manager at Massey University in Wellington, and sole parent, it gave her concentrated periods where, for once, she could work in depth on a photographic project. Wilcox started with a Catching the light around my house series, which she posted daily on Instagram, but soon wanted to step into the landscape with her camera, and crucially, her flash. The series she stepped into is Māhina (twilight) where, in the hour before sunset, she photographed the trees and vegetation beside the long pathway near where she…