Art New Zealand Summer 2024-2025

Auckland Nat Tozer Erotic Geologies Gow Langsford Onehunga 21 September–5 October VICTORIA MUNN With Erotic Geologies, Nat Tozer continues her artistic inquiry into the ground and the underground on an impressive scale. Drawing from a complex myriad of conceptual sources encompassing science fiction, te ao Māori, and Māori and Greek mythology, Tozer digs into the contemporary relevance of the ground and the knowledge that lies below. Doing so, she subverts Western, anthropocentric concepts of knowledge, ownership and time to proffer an alternative ecology. The 15-minute-long film tells the story of two characters, performed by Amber Liberté and Leighton Rangi, who find themselves in a post-earthquake world. Clad in corporate attire, they embark on a quest for survival and draw critical knowledge from their journey underground. In the initial, anthropogenic stage…

Israel Tangaroa Birch is a descendant of Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Rakaipaaka and Ngāi Tawake ki Te Waoku. He is an academic and artist working from the Manawatū and also the Mana Whenua Design Lead for the new civic precinct project in Ahuriri Napier. Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) is an environmental, Indigenous and human rights advocate. This includes local, national and international initiatives that highlight the role of settler colonialism and promote Indigenous solutions. T.N.: So let's start off with your art story, tell us what were some of your early influences. I.T.B.: I was born and raised in Te Matau-a-Māui (Hawke's Bay), raised in the shearing sheds with my parents, then dad worked at the Whakatū freezing works while mum worked in the orchards. When the freezing works…

Luise Fong is an abstract painter. Now in the fourth decade of her practice, she first came to prominence in the early 1990s for sensuous, evocative abstractions, often interpreted as portrayals of micro- and macrocosmic worlds. Originally trained as a printmaker, Fong moved to abstraction in the last of her art-school years, brought on by her exposure to postmodern and French feminist theory. ‘I no longer felt comfortable with imaging the female body,’ Fong notes. ‘I moved to thinking through aspects of picturing the feminine in an intuitive, abstract, subliminal and metaphorical way.’1 But how do you picture the feminine without rehashing the stale yet inescapable gender tropes or straying into essentialist declarations about women's nature? In the 1990s, it was not as simple as moving away from figuration. The…

Tongan barkcloth is in my DNA. It goes back through many generations; I carry it and teach others. I feel like an authentic barkcloth artist, even though I use both contemporary and traditional materials. When I go overseas and share our culture, people pick up on its authenticity. It feels real. I believe I'm meant to share our Tongan culture and practice. That's my mission. 1 There's a Tongan lea heliaki (proverb) that describes the cutting of a baby girl's umbilical cord against the handle of a barkcloth beater (ike), dedicating them to a life's work in service to the Tongan fonua (land, people and nation): ‘Kuo tā ki hono uho’—It has been beaten into the child's umbilical cord.2 The proverb seems apposite for Tui Emma Gillies, whose barkcloth-based art…

There is a numinous glow to the assemblage of landscape paintings in Robert Scott's exhibition Recover the Land at the Forrester Gallery in Ōamaru that brings to mind the salve of the pastoral. In these works, through a combination of glazes and paintwork, the land is positively radiant with sunlight: it might be in a state of benediction. There is an implication that, if traversed, the streamlined clarity of these landscapes could reveal a hidden trail that leads to some valley of recovery and healing, as in a spiritual quest. Certainly, that was my immediate impression upon entering the exhibition, located in the upstairs windowed rooms of the Forrester Gallery, which occupies the former Bank of New South Wales building, designed by the Pugin-influenced architect R.A. Lawson, and is still…

It is hard not to be grumpy about the absurdity of the event itself—about making arbitrary judgements and giving an award for best artist (or whatever), about the desire to put art in the limelight and the pomp and earnestness with which it is all carried out. But at least one artist gets to have something approaching a year's income. And last time round, the expansiveness of the four installations was something to behold. This time, it is more frugal fare. As with so many exhibitions at the Auckland Art Gallery since its failed renovation, the works come in boxes, walled-in, isolated, contracted and confined; there is no spatial flow and energy. Moving from one box to another, one quickly finds oneself in another exhibition altogether (Aotearoa Contemporary) wondering if…