Art New Zealand Summer 2023-2024

Auckland Debbie Harris Corpse Flowers and Chewing Gum Föenander Galleries, 4–22 August BECKY RICHARDS Featuring an ambitious banquet of gutsy ceramic sculpture, Debbie Harris's Corpse Flowers and Chewing Gum leads viewers down a candycoated garden path. Muscular floral oddities congregate in wild beds: apexes of stretching coiled forms and voluptuous botanicals, tiny colour-pop daisies proliferating on the ground plane. Harris's first solo exhibition following the completion of her Master's degree, this mixed-media installation debuts an astonishing quantity of new work, combining the artist's established tactics with marked developments in sculptural practice. Harris's entities are reminiscent of ring-necked Seuss palms, or Sendak's leafy forests—cartoon flora squeezed and coaxed into corporeal abundance, almost monstrous in their sheer size and physicality. A veritable pink princess of ceramics, Harris's chosen palette glistens like Barbie's…

Adrienne Martyn's latest exhibition, Seen/Scene, at He Waka Tuia, Invercargill, is a series of 41 photographic portraits of people from the LGBTQIA+ community who have lived in Southland. Martyn, who now lives in Wellington, grew up in Invercargill; a self-portrait is included in the exhibition. Her return to the portrait genre also presents an opportunity to reflect on her well-known portraits of New Zealand artists in the 1980s, which were quickly acquired by many of this country's public art galleries. In between times, she has produced an extensive body of work focusing on architecture, particularly studies of the interiors of venerable buildings fallen into disuse or stripped of their previous contents or functions. There have been forays too into landscape, and a residency at the Dunedin School of Art in…

In his book Blind Spot, Teju Cole observes the social conditions that caution against retelling history. He writes, ‘we are advised not to say: “1965.” We are advised not to say: “the events of 1965.” We are advised not to say: “in 1965, following a failed coup, the Indonesian Army stoked communal hatreds leading to a massive anti-communist purge … All the Chinese shops in Denpasar, the largest Balinese town, were destroyed. Their owners were killed … There has been no accounting of these horrors.” We are advised, as visitors, not to bring the events of 1965 up in public discussion.‘1 I am reminded of this passage when thinking about the work of Rozana Lee. These events of 1965, which took place five years before Lee was born, are one…

At first glance, Thomas Lord's September exhibition at Dunedin's OLGA, Etheric Bodies, seems to offer us 13 monochrome photographs of nothing much, just nebulous objects and indeterminate places. In fact, these exquisite black-and-white photographic prints come from an ongoing series which is both a kind of pilgrimage back through the history of photography itself, and a kind of exploration of what might be called the undiscovered country of nearby: the wayside verges, regenerated bush areas and beaches of coastal Otago, seen obliquely and in fragments. Photography means, literally, ‘writing with light’, and in returning to the fundamentals using bygone technologies—a nineteenth-century view camera and archaic darkroom techniques, such as dodging and burning—Lord presents the formal play of composition, with brightness and shadow vaporously seeping into one another, while at the…

One is struck, on entering Bev Moon's exhibition Fortune, at the Hocken Gallery, by an abundance … of delicious food. The centrepiece of the main room is a yum cha banquet. Steamed bok choy, dumplings, spring rolls and rice rest on blue and white crockery, familiar to anybody who has ever eaten at a diasporic Chinese restaurant. There are chopsticks and spoons. My companions wonder if the teapots are full. Despite being under glass—we are in a gallery after all—the feast loses none of its vitality. Partly, this is due to the rotating lazy Susan on which some of the food sits, and a pair of lucky ‘waving cats’ positioned in one corner. These moving objects—no doubt—are also familiar; characteristic of yum cha dining. On closer inspection, one notices that…

In pristine urban and architectural environments different species of mammals amble quietly along— either unaware, unconcerned with, or benignantly accepting of each other's presence; apex predators share warehouses with ruminants; beasts of the savannah pass those of the barnyard anonymously, as if on a crowded city street; a lioness and a goat stand side by side in a living room. All around them is civilisation's imprint: industrial, commercial, civic and domestic scaled buildings of various eras; infrastructure and gardens; roads and pathways; colonnades, atriums and verandahs. The places they inhabit were designed and constructed for the benefit of humans, except here, currently, they are bereft of people. There is nothing to suggest a major catastrophe—no ruins, signs of war or natural disaster. Cranes in the background in some shots denote…