Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2024 i Art New Zealand

Before us now there is nothing but sea, sea, sea: one spread, vast, moving field, veined with currents, shimmering with light, and shot like an opal with varying colours—purple and peacock, turquoise and azure, silver and gold and green—an illimitable world of shine and space. Blanche Baughan, ‘The Mountain Track’1 Just when you think you have an artist pegged, they do something so unexpected it completely floors you. This is how I felt when I learned that Pauline Rhodes was showing five paintings at Bowen Galleries in Wellington in April. I have been following Rhodes’ practice for years, fascinated by her commitment to ephemeral installations that she assembles in and out of doors, with a trademark combination of natural and manufactured materials, adjusted and recycled for different situations. While I…

Scientists have struggled for centuries to agree on how best to demarcate living from non-living things. Is the distinction a matter of degree or dichotomy? Emily Parke, an Auckland-based philosopher of science, says that there have been more than a hundred distinct proposals in the Western tradition to define life since antiquity. But whenever someone proposes a criterion, someone else offers an effective counterexample. If metabolism is sufficient for life, then candle flames qualify as living; if reproduction is necessary, then sterile hybrids like mules do not count. While astrobiologists might wish to settle on a definition to guide their cosmic search for ‘life as we know it’, others seem content with the lack of consensus. Disagreement about whether viruses are living or non-living agents, for example, does not impede…

It is safe to guess that the correct answer to about 50 per cent of every pub quiz question on ’80s music is ‘Wham!’, and the legacy of the disco duo lives on, perhaps a little dubiously, at the Pah Homestead. Having recently watched a documentary about the boy wonders and their numerous gifts to pop culture, curator Aleksandra Petrovic asked herself what the 1980s had contributed to art in New Zealand, specifically to the collection with which she works, that owned by the Arts House Trust, centred at Auckland’s Pah Homestead. Initial research produced results that were varied, almost bewilderingly so—the 1980s was a decade ‘of so much’ as she reflects1— but true to her inspiration, she found a title for the resulting show in a Wham! song from…

Australian-born Jackie Ranken’s work is characterised by a distinct style that seamlessly blends elements of nature and human response, resulting in her visually striking and emotionally evocative compositions. Her early exposure to the New Zealand landscape served as the perfect muse, inspiring her to explore the interplay of light, texture and form through the lens of her camera. For many years she has led a double life straddling ‘the ditch’ between Queenstown where, with her husband Mike Langford, she has built a thriving photography workshop business, and Goulburn NSW, where she spends time with her adult family. It was in Mittagong NSW, on her way to a teaching workshop, where she became captivated by the shape of a solitary cloud. ‘It was sitting there on such a beautiful blue-sky day,…

The first solo exhibition held in Gow Langsford’s spectacular new gallery in Princes Street, Onehunga was John Pule’s Haia—new paintings and drawings, 11 May to 8 June. It was a fitting choice as 2024 is the thirtieth anniversary of Pule’s first exhibition with Gow Langsford in 1994. Furthermore, the large scale, brilliant colour and lush tropical imagery of the paintings and the intricate gridded imagery from heterogeneous sources of the sizable works on paper have the presence and clout to command the vast pristine exhibition spaces of the new facility. A big cosmopolitan crowd, including many Niueans, opened proceedings with song, prayer, speechifying and a celebratory atmosphere. The large numbers who viewed April’s opening group show This Must Be the Place and Pule’s exhibition suggest that Aucklanders have quickly included…

Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life tracks this artist’s history and with it that of the textile arts in Aotearoa from the 1950s to the present day. In addition, Blackman’s curatorial projects are documented in videos and museum cases. At the opening forum, Jane Malthus, Linda Tyler and Patricia Te Arapo Wallace described respectively Blackman’s research into the textile holdings of Otago Museum as its honorary curator, her restitution of the invisible roles of museum artist Lily Daff, and her diagnostic work on tāniko, the geometric woven borders of whatu kakahu, that culminated in her contribution to Te Papa’s exhibition and book Whatu Kākahu, Māori Cloaks.1 The larger of two displays presents a chronology of Blackman’s weaving, while the other presents her curatorial research into non-European and Māori…

Offering It Up is Sophia Smolenski’s first solo show in a public art gallery, although she has worked in the industry for over a decade as a mount-maker and exhibition technician. It features a magnificent bright red welder’s screen, comically oversized choak (the piece of protective foam placed between an artwork and the floor during installation), a 55-minute video of Smolenski in her workshop, an empty frame and a custom trolley, crate and vitrine. The vitrine is a precisely crafted work of art containing mounts constructed by Smolenski for her own personal purposes. She chose not to reveal these purposes to the 22 artists invited to join the project, preferring to trust them to create artworks as they saw fit in an open form of collaboration. The resulting show explores…

Print in Aotearoa New Zealand has always had its champions. Some work behind the scenes, others are outspoken movers and shakers, ensuring print remains a dynamic field of creative practice. A brief historic overview sees the first Print Council of New Zealand1 formed by significant artists, all of whom were committed to establishing a new understanding of, and for, print. Many went on to exhibit, curate and teach at a tertiary level;2 others set up private studios and regional print groups.3 In the late 1990s, under the leadership of artist Marty Vreede,4 a group was formed to focus on providing support for print graduates, to keep them connected through workshops, exhibitions and newsletters. This then morphed into a new national organisation in 2000, the Print Council of Aotearoa New Zealand…

Mélange… a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. Salman Rushdie ‘In Good Faith’ (1991) Many artists are prodigious readers and intensive researchers. Books can be portals into new worlds, ideas, different kinds of knowledge.1 Reading enables the mixing of unlike elements that go into the making of most compelling art. The title’s partial quotation is from Ecclesiastes (12:12) in the Old Testament. The passage is quoted in full in C.F. Goldie’s Of Making Many Books there is no end, and Much Study is a Weariness to the Flesh (1900), the first painting purchased for Whanganui’s then-new Sarjeant Art Gallery the next year. Nevertheless, Goldie (1870–1947) was a studious reader. Books he owned and signed showed up in quantity during the 1970s in…

Toi Whakaata/Reflections presents a selection of works by Fred Graham (b.1928) (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) made between 1965 and 2013. Displayed in one large room, on the ground floor at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, the sculptures are installed fastidiously to give space to each piece yet allow an overview of his work that celebrates his achievement spanning nearly 50 years. Undoubtedly it is one of the most significant exhibitions of sculpture by a single artist mounted in Tāmaki Makaurau. It confirms Graham’s status as a sculptor able to speak with an authoritative voice while introducing Māori mythology and motifs from traditional whakairo, kōwhaiwhai and raranga into his sculptures. In doing so he makes them relevant to the contemporary world and not buried in the past. There is clarity and…

‘From the moment I started talking to her I knew it sounded silly. Usually, she would be discussing therapy for relationship issues, drug addiction and mental illnesses, yet here I am explaining to her that I can’t stop doing graffiti.’ Many graffiti artists grapple internally with such a transition, but never one to be defined by expectation, Wellington artist Cameron Hunt decided to seek professional help. An unlikely and somewhat absurd scene were it to come from anyone else, for Hunt it seems entirely fitting. His charming sense of creative mischief has always been underlined by his inquisitive nature, his work manifesting as considered chaos exploring and poking fun at the world, acerbic and cheeky, but always thoughtful and engaging. Ultimately, Hunt’s therapy session was marked by confusion: ‘I could…

Venice’s first International Art Exhibition was held in 1895, the year before the first modern Olympic Games, and ‘the Olympics of art’ has become a routine journalistic gloss for the Biennale d’Arte. Mataaho Collective won one of the three main prizes on offer at this year’s event, the Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition. The sports analogy deserves to be seen through on this occasion: as an achievement, theirs is on a par with those of the likes of Peter Snell and Lisa Carrington. The Great Exhibition-inspired, nineteenth-century structure of national cultures in competition has, of course, dated to a point where national self-representation is everywhere ironised and strategically displaced at the Biennale. Amongst the 88 official national pavilions, Denmark’s signage reads ‘Kalaallit Nunaat’ (Greenland, in…

In 1963, disappointed by lack of sales at his recent exhibitions,1 and generally frustrated by the difficulty of making a living as a professional painter in New Zealand, Auckland artist Dennis K. Turner sold up in preparation for moving to London. Among the items he disposed of from his studio flat in Grafton was a hand-operated 1857 vintage Albion printing press which Robert Ellis, then Senior Lecturer in Design at the Elam School of Fine Arts, recalled buying for £9.2 Turner had acquired the press some five years earlier from the New Zealand Herald, where it was under threat of being broken up. He also understood that it had a much earlier history, having been used for printing Māori Bibles. With his initial interest being in its preservation, Turner had…

Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker with contributions from Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith and Megan Tamati-Quennell Auckland University Press, Auckland 2024 SUSAN BALLARD In narratives of political awakening people often tell of a gradual dawning; a growing sense that things cannot have always been the way they are now. For me, there were two early moments of feminist encounter. The first was in the early 1990s in the hallways of the Dunedin School of Art. I had just finished earnestly explaining to my photography lecturer why I would not be participating in life drawing classes, when she called over another student, said, ‘you two should work together’ and walked off. The lecturer was Di ffrench…