Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2023 i Art New Zealand

Otago and Dunedin were Gary Blackman' visual patch for almost seven decades: a strength for him but not so good for his wider profile. Justin Paton's comprehensive 2003 Survey show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery1 deserved to be seen elsewhere, but for various reasons it did not travel, constituting a regrettably missed opportunity for those curious about the development of contemporary photographic practice in this country. This is a decisive factor in Blackman's national reputation being in inverse proportion to his achievement as a photographer. Blackman was raised in a milieu sympathetic to art-making—his father, Lance, was a notable pictorialist photographer (whose family albums are intriguingly modernist in flavour)—and the young Gary attended art classes at the Dunedin School of Art when presided over by the innovative and pioneering…

The long waves of our ocean is a group show in Wellington's National Library Gallery, in which seven early-career artists have made work responding to various writers, exploring where their practices intersect with the image-making of poetry. Beyond this, each artist manages to tease out a wealth of nuance from their respective writers, a select pool which includes Albert Wendt, Hone Tuwhare, J.C. Sturm, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Keri Hulme. In making each writer's work their own, these seven visual artists embrace that public character of an artwork or piece of writing, when a work takes on a life of its own once freed into culture's wide whiterapid stream. Ana Iti's A separation between you and me (2022) speaks plainly to our fractiously cleaved intersubjective field, arguably to incendiary…

Collaboration can allow artists to explore new creative directions as a refreshing distraction from existing expectations, or it can illuminate established practices in new ways through conversation with the work of another. Archetypes, shown at Fiksate Gallery in November, is a series of paintings by Christchurch artists Jessie Rawcliffe and Dr Suits (the creative pseudonym of Nathan Ingram), which exemplifies the latter of the two approaches; layering Rawcliffe's figuration with Ingram's abstractions, the juxtapositions render new outcomes without the need for either artist's reinvention. Despite distinct approaches individually, Archetypes feels like a natural synthesis, the sum rather than the parts ensuring fresh possibilities. Rawcliffe's meticulously detailed figurative paintings initially developed as an alternative to restrictive design commissions. Questioning the power dynamics of traditional portraiture by turning the gaze back on…

When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth. Robert Macfarlane, Underland Before me there is a collection of stones, burnished and smooth. I know that a couple of kilometres away, there are more. They have been selected and worked by Anton Forde (Iwi Taranaki, Gaeltacht, Gaelic, English), a sculptor of stone and wood. To be a sculptor is also to be a finder and surfacer of forms, over which meaning can be draped like a shawl. Forde has named the works Kāmaka, which is an old word he says—another…

Books Heaven by Nicole Page-Smith Harris Smith Art Ltd, Dunedin 2022 DON ABBOTT Nicole Page-Smith's Heaven is a dream, in two parts. The first is an essay that reads more like a mantra or a prayer, an essay that focuses on several themes, which are explored and expressed repeatedly, in a manner that is poetic, hypnotic and compulsive. Ideas surrounding creation, harvest, the cosmos, gardens, plants, the seasons, deer, hay, the forest, colour and the Divine are written out in a chant-like way that both soothes and seduces the reader. The repetition of ideas and words equates the writing with the forms and concepts of music, and Page-Smith creates a linguistic harmony with her words. The text is non-narrative and non-linear, although it follows its own path—in the beginning it…

Auckland Projects 2022: Aotearoa Made Aotearoa Art Fair, The Cloud, 16-20 November DON ABBOTT During the Aotearoa Art Fair the Cloud, the fair's venue on the Auckland waterfront, proved itself to be one of the worst buildings in the country. No matter the season, no matter the weather, the ambient temperature in it is far from comfortable; the bitumen floor, built over the waters of the Waitematā, remains perpetually damp, sucking the spring out of every step you take. The only thing it has going for it is the white canvas roof, that lets in loads of natural light, helping the art inside look good to prospective buyers. It is the same roof that interrupted my experience of each of this year's Projects at the art fair, each in a…

To photograph is to freeze a moment in the present, but even as a picture is taken, we have made a connection with history and its ghostly companions, memory and mortality. We feel their presence particularly when we view images of the deceased— loved ones, family or ancestors—transporting us back to the time when the image was made, or being once again in the presence of a lost person. As time passes, photographs may become the memory, providing more certainty about a person or events than our wavering recollections. One of the most famous examples of photographic recall is the Winter Garden photograph of French thinker Roland Barthes who, in his 1980 book Camera Lucida, summoned the essence of his late mother in an image of her, aged five, standing…

Tongan-born Wellington-based artist Telly Tuita is the kind of frantic alchemist you might imagine if I said ‘Pacifica Warhol in an alternate dimension’, swapping out the ironic commerciality of the silver factory (and film) for a technicolour, upcycled output of sculpture, photography, and painting. Catching him in a moment of (from what I gather, uncharacteristic) calm between shows, I was lucky enough to visit Tuita at his home to talk life, art, and current and upcoming projects. After offering me lunch (‘I'm a feeder’) Tuita mentions work he did for a Big Day Out—rest in peace—which for those too young to remember was once Australasia's premier annual music festival (no shame to Tuita; I'm also in that fossil-camp of historical attendees). It was here, in being quizzed about his work,…

Downtime and a new city spurred Luke Denny to start a new photographic project at home. Newly returned to his birthplace of Christchurch, with experience in the fashion industry, he relied on his own resources to create a series of portraits that draw on colour and photographic techniques to evoke mood and emotion. Each shot required a small investment of time to achieve: taking the photograph, experimenting, trial and error, review and self-critique, reshooting. Denny used the project as a way to push his limits and test his proficiency with the equipment and the medium, and have fun along the way. Throughout, his wife Su modelled for his finished images, and their experimental precursors, patiently, and sometimes grudgingly, posing as he tried various options before the right result was attained.…

Two large sculptural installations by Shona Rapira-Davies recently featured at the Len Lye Centre at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Over 12 months, linked thematically, they shared time and space for a few weeks. During this brief period, I visited the gallery. The first installation, Ko te Kihikihi, was originally part of the successful group show Swallowing Geography, with the late Matt Pine, Kate Newby and Ana Iti. Sensitively curated by Megan Tāmati-Quennell, this exhibition considered human relationships with land and space—how settler communities absorb and exploit the landscape, consume its narratives of indigenous culture and location, and attempt to uplift and establish themselves by redefining and manipulating those ‘traumatic histories [which] speak of environmental and cultural exploitation; of rupture, violence, displacement, alienation’.1 Within the tribal domain, on the slopes…

In her 2021 book Art and Nature in the Anthropocene, Susan Ballard explores how artists have responded to the ecological crises of our Anthropocene. According to Ballard, contemporary art problematises the way in which Anthropocene discourse defines humanity as a homogeneous actor or species when discussing global change. She writes: ‘In contemporary art, the most interesting challenges to a fixed definition of the Anthropocene are present in artworks … that approach the planetary from situated and local experiences.’1 Thai-born New Zealander Sorawit Songsataya's practice has shared concerns with Ballard's conception of an art for the Anthropocene. The artist employs moving image and sculpture in order to reflect on what it means for humans to shape Earth's geology at local, regional and global levels. This work is the result of Songsataya's…

In 1876 the 23-year-old Auckland Museum moved into its fourth home and first purpose-built premises, at 2 Princes Street, on the corner of Eden Crescent and the top of Shortland Street. The occasion, marked by an opening exhibition and a two-week long programme of events, was something of a multimedia extravaganza, the likes of which had not previously been seen in that city—or perhaps even elsewhere in the colony. Prior to its official opening the New Zealand Herald suggested that the new museum would, more than any other to date, mark the Auckland province's progress in ‘the development of thought and culture’. It would represent another step in the transplanting of ‘civilisation’ to this distant outpost of the Empire which, 30 years ago, was said to be known to the…