Showing posts with label art galleries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art galleries. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 February 2009

Fiona Hall - Force Field

I can't remember when I last saw such a stunning sculpture show. Fiona Hall's retrospective at the Christchurch City Gallery is large, rich, and varied, almost too much to take in in one visit. It closes this Sunday, the 15th, so if you haven't already seen it, get down there. More information is here.

I'm going to list some of my favourite pieces to give you a taste:

Cell Culture

These familiar-looking Tupperware pottles have sprouted delicate limbs, claws, fins. They have morphed into new and alien forms of life.

Castles in the air of the Cave Dwellers

Models of insect colonies are attached, like outgrowths, to model human brains. A colony of social insects, which to humans seems like a utopia, a model world, is contrasted with the brain, a colony of cells that houses only one isolated individual.

Paradisus Terrestris

These exquisite sculptures are partly-open tins revealing depictions of human bodies, and each one is surmounted by a plant motif which echoes the human form within.

Syntax of flowers

Flowers are the reproductive parts of plants, and their beauty and their scent are designed to attract pollinators. This work plays with the idea that humans use flower perfumes to attract each other: The bottles of flower essences are decorated with paintings of naked women in frankly suggestive poses.

Scar Tissue

This work is housed in a cross-shaped display case, and consists of videos of war movies, with the videotape unspooling from the cassette and knitted into glittering, dark, frightening forms which hover above them. The forms appear to emanate from the video cassettes, like horrifying afterimages that cannot be erased from the memory.

When My Boat Comes In

In this work Hall explores the economics of plants, how the import, export, and exploitation of particular species, such as sugar, tea, coffee, and rubber have influenced the world economy and created huge imbalances of wealth. Hall has gathered banknotes from many different currencies, all depicting boats or ships, and on the banknotes painted the leaf of a plant native to each particular country.

Tender

In this work Hall has meticulously copied the forms of various types of birds' nests, using hand-shredded banknotes as her raw material. As the names of the bird species face off against the serial numbers of the banknotes, we are left to contemplate the consequences of commercial exploitation of natural resources.

Friday, 30 January 2009

Sky voyage

In this picture, part of Graham Bennett's sculpture Reasons for Voyaging sets off into the altocumulous undulatus (clouds). Outside the Christchurch City Art Gallery.

Image copyright 2009 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.



Thursday, 29 January 2009

Glass Invitational NZ at Canterbury Museum







Gallia Amsel: West Coast Surf 17 (2008), cast glass, sandblasted, acid etched & polished



The annual Glass Invitational NZ runs until February 8th at the Robert McDougall Gallery in the Botanic Gardens, and if you haven't seen it yet, you should get down there. It's a small but diverse show.


Particularly interesting to me were:


Elizabeth Thomson's Another Green World series of wall pieces, where spiny microbial forms emerge from depressions in a gently-moulded green landscape, which resembles 1950s upholstery.


Stephen Bradbourne's White linear bottles and White linear frond form, which are stunningly displayed in a black room by themselves, on a black pedestal with lights illuminating the white forms from below, so they glow. The glowing gourd-like bottle forms seemed full of life.


Elizabeth McClure's Domestic Science series, of scientific glassware decorated with floral and leafy patterns. The decoration is in some cases sandblasted onto the surface of the beakers and jars, and in some cases applied, creating the appearance of burnout velvet. The overall effect is subtly disquieting, a disconcerting mix of the clinical with the domestic.


Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams' Sophora Chandeliers, where cast kowhai blooms are suspended from glass brackets. I don't know if downlighting for these pieces was not available in this gallery, but they were displayed each with a glaring bulb in the centre, which destroyed the subtle play of light within the pieces that you can see on the website.


You can see all the pieces in the show illustrated here. But go and see it if you can, you get a lot more from walking around the artworks than you do from just looking at photos of them.

Wednesday, 29 October 2008

See Rita Angus online

Te Papa has curated a huge touring show of Rita Angus' work from their collection, which is currently in Dunedin, and will move on to Christchurch and Auckland during 2009. To promote the exhibition they have extensive material online here, with high-resolution zoomable reproductions and commentary provided.

This is such an amazing resource on one of New Zealand's foremost painters. Have a look!

Saturday, 18 October 2008

New Tim Main show

Tim Main is opening an exciting new show of sculptural works at the Milford Gallery in Auckland on November 5th. His recent works are elegant combinations of Gothic architectural forms and New Zealand native plants. Read all about the show here.

Russell Moses: Garden of Light

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery has a brilliant Russell Moses show. Moses' works are paintings, sculptures, and fascinating hybrids of painting and sculpture. In one of my favourite pieces he has made a string of giant clay beads in the shape of a stellar constellation, to hang over a painted clay ground. Stars made of earth: I love it!

Other works reference mining, with patterns of metallic pigment emerging from a clay ground; Green paintings mimic the markings of pounamu, but also of light on water or trees in a landscape. Cross motifs in his work refer to measurement and surveying, the carving up and carving out of the land; the patterns he makes also evoke natural shifts and processes: night and day, movement of the sun and stars, seasons, growth and erosion.

You can see more examples of his beautiful work here.

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Daniel Crooks: everywhere instantly

This new installation in the Christchurch City Art Gallery has to be seen to be believed! It's hard to describe in words, but I've never seen anything like it.
"Crooks transforms everyday sights such as trains and city streets into wide-screen meditations on time and motion", as the gallery website says.
I've never seen video used in such an unusual way. Go see it.

Monday, 7 July 2008

New Tim Main show

Tim Main's stunning, subtle designs based on New Zealand flora draw on the tradition of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but have a gentle elegance all their own. His new show at CoCA is a must-see. It's on until the 20th July.

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Graham Bennett exhibition - Converse

If you're in Christchurch be sure to catch this amazing show of Graham Bennett sculptures at The Art House in Gloucester St, until 15 June.
Bennett's subject matter in the show deals with New Zealand's antipodean location, mapping, navigation, and the migration of peoples by sea. His beautiful, immaculate forms also suggest sentinels, lookouts, and alien peoples.
The show's centerpiece, the monumental PoDs, features a crowd of 60 forms of various heights, the tallest up to 4 metres high.
Apparently Graham Bennett has just turned 60 himself. Many happy returns, Graham. :-)

Sunday, 11 May 2008

Morris and Co.

The Christchurch City Art Gallery has Morris and Co: The World of William Morris until June 29th. It's a beautiful show, with printed textiles, wallpaper, embroidery, furniture, carpets, books, ceramics, and the centerpiece of the show, the vast, jewel-like tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi. It's worth seeing the show for that alone - no photograph can adequately convey the shining, rippling surface of millions of tiny stitches. And while the symbolism is rather laboured, the rich colour harmonies and beautifully-observed naturalistic detail in the plants and faces and objects is exciting to look at.

One thing that would have increased my enjoyment of the Morris designs was more technical information about how they were printed and made. I was tantalised by a photograph of the Morris workshop printing chintz fabric, with stacks of wooden printing blocks visible in the photo, but no indication of how such a method was used to produce such fine, continuous, printed pattern. And how were the inks made? I gather they were derived from plants, but I'd love to know the details.

And how did the cost of producing Morris designs by hand compare with the cost of factory production? How different did they look? What are the economics of hand-printing today? Morris's revolt against mass-production and worker exploitation seems highly relevant to the globalised market we have today. But I wonder how many people could afford to surround themselves with beautiful hand-printed, hand-crafted objects.

I was pleased to see more information on Morris's book-printing techniques given on the gallery website, and the links they make to artisan-printing in New Zealand.

The exhibition is accompanied by a huge range of events, from lectures to performances, demonstrations, and even workshops in Morris-style embroidery, wallpaper- printing, and life-drawing!

Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Sam Mahon

I didn't know Sam Mahon was a painter as well as a sculptor, but the Christchurch City Art Galley has this amazing example, and this too. I'm sure his upcoming show at CoCA's Mair Gallery will be well worth seeing.

And kudos to the City Gallery for putting their permanent collection online. It's a great resource, and it's part of what public galleries are for.

Tuesday, 31 July 2007

Jingle Jangle Morning

Bill Hammond's huge new show at Christchurch's City Gallery is a knockout. It shows the development of his personal iconography of bird-headed figures, his love of repeat patterns, his transcribing of musical forms into painting, and his dream-like primeval landscapes. I love the freedom of his drawing and compositions, and dripping, streaky applications of paint, and the stunning effects he gets from an almost monochromatic palette. Go see it if you can.

Tuesday, 15 May 2007

Sense of place

I saw Picturing the Peninsula at the Christchurch City Gallery the other day, and it was fascinating. It's a collection of paintings, drawings and photographs of Canterbury's Banks Peninsula: you'd be amazed how diverse the images are. Standouts for me were paintings from Tony Fomison and Dean Venrooy, and a photograph from Mark Adams.

I looked online for more information on Dean Venrooy's amazing paintings, and this was about all I could find.