Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2024-2025 i Art New Zealand

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…

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…

Te Matau-a-Māui Contemporary Art: Gwen Malden Trust Commissions builds on a legacy of biennial exhibitions in Hawke's Bay which began with the much-loved national Norsewear Art Awards in 1987. After 21 years, the Awards wound up when sponsorship ended. In 2012, EAST was established as a regionally focused biennial. Even without Norsewear's generous financial rewards, a line-up of highly regarded guest curators ensured that EAST became an important part of the regional arts ecosystem. The Gwen Malden Trust Commissions begin a new chapter and bring much-needed financial support for the creation of new work in difficult times. The Trust, using funds generated from the family's Kereru Station, has long had a significant impact on the arts in Hawke's Bay, including support for MTG, Napier's museum, theatre and gallery, and Hastings’…

While narratives of Empire and colonisation form a dense canopy over the burgeoning ground-cover of Case Studies, the collaborative photographic works gathered under that title are, at the same time, infused with a myriad of personal associations and nuances. Photographer Mark Smith and botanical artist Felicity Jones have been working on the series since 2018, during which time the Wardian case has asserted itself as a central device—both visual and metaphorical. Invented by English naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward just over a decade before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the Wardian case soon became, as the artists state, an important device in botanical globalisation: ‘During the nineteenth century these cases carried thousands of plants on ships heading for Aotearoa and made the return journey filled with NZ natives, many destined…

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…

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…

The first you see and hear at Sydney Contemporary, squatting over the entrance to Carriageworks, is an enormous inflated gibbon, the male mating calls of which seem to soften the concrete, brick and steel of the venue's forecourt. Gow Langsford instigated the installation of Lisa Roet's large (9 metres high and 20 metres wide) monkey, and the primate made quite an impression, a topic throughout speeches, welcomes and conversations for days: have you seen the gibbon?; have you heard the gibbon? The animal's predicament—discovered in 2017 in the mountains that straddle the China–Myanmar border, mainly as a result of deforestation, it is critically endangered—is now extremely well-known, at least amongst a certain stratum of Sydney society. Gow Langsford also nabbed the first-you-see-when-you-enter spot inside the building. The Auckland gallery exhibited…

As the last habitable landmass on Earth to be settled by humans, New Zealand's natural environment remained relatively undisturbed for some 23 million years. But that all changed around 1250–1300 AD with the arrival of Māori ancestors from East Polynesia. At that stage most of the land was covered in forest, but those early settlers burned off large areas, to flush out game birds such as moa—which soon became extinct. The fires, some of which were probably accidental, and others which almost certainly got out of control, caused widespread deforestation on the eastern parts of both the North and South Islands.1 The process continued with the next wave of settlers. In 1840 Britons planning to immigrate to New Zealand were informed that their new home had extensive forests offering an…

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…

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…

What is a seed? I roll curved, rounded forms around in my mind, ruminating … . Holding seeds in the palm of my hand, I push them around with the tip of an index finger, examining them in the light. A seed is the propagative part of a plant. A fertilised, ripened ovule, as a reproductive body, a seed is pure potential. Because it contains an embryo, it is capable of germination. A seed can produce a new plant. Grains of rice and tear-drop-shaped sunflower seeds are embedded in the surfaces of paintings included in Nicola Farquhar's latest exhibition Stars, lands at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Given the role that linseed plays in the composition of oil paint, perhaps this should not be so surprising. In the larger-scale work Circuituar…