Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Jeena Shin Time-delay Two Rooms, 11 March–14 April AMY STEWART On the afternoon that I visited Jeena Shin’s Time-delay in the upper of Two Rooms’ two rooms, the bright afternoon sun was making an installation of the nine canvases. In a remarkable bit of visual happenstance, crisp white light streamed through the skylights, covering the room in illuminated shards. This sunlit cameo mirroring Shin’s forms was random, and it served as an excellent primer for a show about time and layered reality. The nine canvases—all titled Time-delay plus a number—form two series, one numbered in Hindu-Arabic numerals and the other Roman. The series share the same protagonist in the tessellated triangular form that Shin has riffed on since 2004, based on a piece of paper folded once,…

I was notorious, as a child, for carrying stones in my pockets. The Scottish island where I grew up is marked with places rich in treasures: speckled pink granite, flinty shards of slate flecked with iron pyrite, basalt smoothed by near-freezing water to fit perfectly into the cupped palm of a hand. Alice Bonifant’s Sometime later (2012), on display in Listening Stones Jumping Rocks at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, taps into the universality of this childhood compulsion. A rock, collected from the Makara coast and cast in bronze, is presented on a dark wooden plinth. Concentric fissures in the wooden surface of the plinth mark a tree’s annual growth rings: organic growth and human intervention combined in one object. On the wall behind this plinth a grid…

Called into the gallery, I enter. ‘Maranga mai, e te iwi. O ngā hapū Ngā Puhi . . . ’ From one waka to another. I leave Ōtautahi in the South Island, Te Waka o Māui to some and Te Waka o Aoraki to others, making my way to the clear blue waters of Te Tai Tokerau. It is my first time travelling anywhere north of Tāmaki Makaurau and is a trip I have been meaning to make for a long time. I have arrived in Whangārei to visit the inaugural exhibition at the Wairau Māori Art Gallery, Puhi Ariki. It is curated by Nigel Borell (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi te Rangi, Te Whakatōhea, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Apakura) who, for many years, has been instrumental in creating space for Māori stories…

The title quotation comes from my impassioned letter to The Press, answering Lesley Beaven, loyal wife of the late Christchurch architect Peter Beaven, arch-critic of Neil Dawson’s sculpture. I should have simply called it ‘Chalice’, which Dawson far prefers, as the ‘the’ would look arrogant. Its omission is moreover consistent with this highly idiosyncratic, ‘see-through’, outsized and stemless interpretation of the Holy Communion vessel. Yet so familiar is this landmark (imagine someone saying ‘Let’s meet by the Chalice’), that Dawson should relax. Nomenclature aside, 20 years after the unveiling, writing Chalice’s art history is overdue. Minus the critical chatter of resource consent submissions, numerous letters to The Press and editorials, Chalice’s history would be relatively uncomplicated and uncontroversial but duller. With apologies to the historian Lord Macaulay, there was ’no…

Grahame Sydney is associated with Central Otago and meticulously rendered landscapes of ochre hills and big skies. He is at once a celebrated and a marginal figure in New Zealand art. His paintings are sought after by collectors, they have shaped how many people see Central Otago (even though they are composite and invented scenes rather than actual views), and he was knighted in 2021. Yet his work is rarely curated into significant exhibitions of New Zealand art or included in major anthologies. This may be because, as Sydney himself attests, his paintings are conservative in style and methods, including the anachronistic egg tempera medium that he has frequently preferred. Also, he has refused to be part of a dealer gallery stable since 1995. Aspects of Sydney’s career remain seldom…

Through the 1980s and ’90s Aucklander Sarah Smuts-Kennedy worked as an actor, as well as running her own applied arts business, SSK Design. It was after moving to Australia in 2000 that she began her visual art practice, initially working in photography. Her 2006 Painting Rubbish series consisted of monochromatic renderings of her photographs of trash-strewn, smoky landscapes on the outskirts of New Delhi. Moody vistas of snaky trees and drifts of plastic litter form dark rectangles superimposed over washy sepia grounds. What the artist calls ‘shabby realism’1 intersects with the dusty light and drooping eucalypts of a conventional Australian landscape tradition. One of these works, Garden View, was purchased for the office of the then Shadow Minister for the Environment (and later Australian Prime Minister), Malcolm Turnbull. Smuts-Kennedy recalls:…

Certain kinds of beauty call for casting one’s descriptive net beyond the canon of romantic tropes. In her novel H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald describes the plumage of a goshawk she is training as ‘beautiful like a granite cliff or a thundercloud’. ‘There was a distinct, prehistoric scent to her feathers; it caught in my nose, peppery, rusty as storm-rain.’1 This is the language of a place beyond summers’ days and darling buds of May. The descriptive specificity of these passages of Macdonald’s came to mind on viewing the series between two worlds by Wellington-based photographer Lara Gilks—and not just because of the feathers. Gilks describes the series as a meditation on ‘passing between two worlds’, but she is deliberately not specific about what the worlds are to which…

David Cook’s vibrant portrayal of his 1990s Hamilton East neighbours explodes from large-scale prints in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata and from the pages of his book Jellicoe & Bledisloe (published by Rim Books). But framing Cook’s photographs is a layer of time that pulls us back and forth between the work and our current reality and shapes the meaning of what we are looking at. Cook began the series after moving into a former state house at 33 Bledisloe Terrace in 1989. He worked full-time at Waikato Museum and his photographic work was commissioned by the curators there. While he loved the museum projects, as an artist he felt it was a long time since he had done anything fuelled by his own curiosity and intentions.…

When Florian Habicht’s Rubbings from a Live Man was launched in 2008 there was a standing ovation at a packed Civic Theatre, and at Waiheke’s little community cinema. I saw the film again last night 14 years on and seven years after Warwick’s death in 2015 in his Waiheke home. This time round, screened to coincide with this year’s Pride Festival, there were three people in the Waiheke Cinema auditorium. I came away from that last screening thinking of masques and masks. I concluded that Rubbings from A Live Man (Warwick’s chosen and disturbing title), unlike his multitude of marvellous Dadaist, surrealist theatrical extravaganzas—his masques—was, quite deliberately, Warwick un-masked. Warwick in the raw. And what a paradox! All those mad, magical, events he had conjured up over decades were never…