Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu of the Climate Has Allowed Little Human Impact on the Natural Environment Was Something of a Revelation
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Christchurch Art Gallery EXHIBITION PROGRAMME – AUGUST 2007 TO MARCH 2008 Handboek: Ans Westra to 21 October 2007 Ans Westra is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated photographers, whose career spans almost 50 years. Recently awarded an Arts Foundation laureate, she is particularly well- known for her images of Maori, the 1970s counterculture and protest action. This exhibition is a large-scale survey containing work selected from about 48,000 negatives that reside in the Westra archive at Turnbull Pictures in the National Library. Westra’s recurring themes of Ans Westra Maori social, cultural and Opening of meeting house, 'Arohanui Ki Te Tangata', political life are well Waiwhetu Marae, September 1960 represented in pictures made during the last five decades of the 20th Century. Interspersed among them are photographs of subjects less commonly associated with Westra. The exhibition provides samples from specific projects of particular historical or personal significance – Washday at the Pa and Washday at the Pa Revisited; the Parakino photographs. Handboek is a concise guide of Westra’s photographic journey, a form of visual writing of New Zealand history, with a particular emphasis on Maori during the same period. Handboek: Ans Westra will celebrate Westra’s practice and provide an insight into New Zealand’s social history. Handboek: Ans Westra photographs are based on the Alexander Turnbull Library collections and has been organised by BWX (Blair Wakefield Exhibitions) in association with the National Library Gallery. Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning to 21 October 2007 Bill Hammond is one of New Zealand's most influential contemporary artists. He was born in Christchurch in 1947 and attended the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. During the 1970s, he worked in a sign factory, made jewellery and designed and manufactured wooden toys before returning fulltime to painting in 1981. Birds first began to populate Hammond's paintings after he visited the Auckland Islands in 1989, as part of the 'Art in the Subantarctic' project. Bill Hammond The Fall Of Icarus The three-week trip 1995 to the remote, windswept Acrylic on canvas Purchased 2006 islands, where the severity Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu of the climate has allowed little human impact on the natural environment was something of a revelation. In an interview with Gregory O'Brien for 'Lands and Deeds' (Godwit, Auckland, 1996), Hammond spoke of the islands as a kind of lost world, ruled over by beak and claw: "The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It's bird land." Bill Hammond's compositions encompass humour, beauty, and lyricism while reflecting a unique expression of New Zealand's cultural landscape. The Gallery is creating a major exhibition that includes early music inspired 'in your face' paintings, as well as Hammond’s Walter Buller series painted after his visit to the sub-Antarctic, through to the startling zoomorphic paintings, ancestral studies and recent work that takes the extinct Giant New Zealand Eagle as its theme. Hammond's luscious palette of inky blues, his signature use of emerald green and gold and his endlessly inventive combination of anthropomorphic birds, horses and hybrid creatures will offer viewers a unique insight into the oeuvre of this singular artist. It is anticipated that the exhibition will include major paintings from 1985 to the present with a selection of screens and paintings on found objects. Aerial Farm: Phil Dadson to 14 October 2007 Phil Dadson Still from Aerial Farm 2004 Aerial Farm is part of Auckland artist Phil Dadson’s Polar Projects, a series of sound and video installations that capture through aural and visual imagery a sense of what it is like to exist in the Antarctic. Dadson, a sound, video and performance artist, camped for a week in the Dry Valleys, recording the visual and audio elements of the landscape as part of his 2003 Artist Fellowship in Antarctica. “Mostly the valley seems silent, with only a background hiss of pink noise to accompany the intrusive sounds of my body, my footsteps. No bird or animal noises, only occasional ice snaps and explosive retorts from the splintering glacial-face and the lakes of frozen seepage from the melt” – Dadson wrote in his diary. Aerial Farm is an image of communications apparatus, the wind blowing through the multiple wires, creates a mesmerising, almost meditative sonic sound, while the image portrays the harshness of the environment juxtaposed with the efforts to which human beings go to keep in touch. To the Unknown New Zealander: Julian Dashper to 14 October 2007 To the Unknown New Zealander is in part contemporary artist Julian Dashper’s response to the lone figure seated on the railway platform in Rita Angus’s iconic painting Cass. Voted New Zealand’s greatest painting last year, Cass will be exhibited along with Dashper’s The Anguses, a work Untitled (The warriors) 1998 Julian Dashper. Vinyl on drumheads with inspired by Rita Angus. junior drum kit. Courtesy of the artist, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland The mixed media show and Kaliman Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Ashley Barber will also feature paintings, photographs and one of Dashper’s signature found object pieces – drum kits. Peppered throughout the Gallery, the drum kits, known as The Hoteres, The Woollastons, The Anguses, The Drivers, and The McCahons, will be exhibited alongside works by these artists in the Gallery’s Permanent Collection display. Other pieces in the exhibition will be seven panels of plywood painted with morphine, along with examples of Dashper’s records and their sleeves. Dashper is an Auckland-based artist with an international outlook and profile. To the Unknown New Zealander is Dashper’s first major exhibition in Christchurch since Slideshow which was held at the McDougall Art Annex of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 1992. Painters as Printmakers 19 October to 7 December 2007 Gretchen Albrecht 'Pounamu II' (2002) Lithograph Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Many of New Zealand’s most significant painters have excelled in the less prestigious medium of printmaking, as the Painters as Printmakers exhibition will demonstrate. Painters as Printmakers is an exhibition of prints produced by leading New Zealand painters over the past 50 years. Using a selection of prints from the Gallery’s Collection, Painters as Printmakers will illustrate the importance of prints in many painters’ careers, focussing in particular on their collaborations with printmakers. Painters often work with print techniques that reflect their approach to painting. The precise nature of screen prints provided an ideal medium for Gordon Walters’ interest in the geometric abstraction found in his paintings, while Ralph Hotere’s lithographs reflect the same spontaneous manner as his paintings. Featured in the exhibition will be prints by Gretchen Albrecht, Ralph Hotere, Jeffrey Harris, Philip Clairmont, John Pule, Tony Fomison, Gordon Walters, Robin White, Colin McCahon, Shane Cotton, Philippa Blair, Patrick Hanly, Philip Trusttum, Trevor Moffitt, Louise Henderson and Tony de Lautour. Art School 125 125 Years of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury 9 November 2007 to mid-February 2008 William Sutton, Dry September, 1949. Oil on canvas Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 1973 The University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts celebrates 125 years in 2007 and the Gallery’s major summer exhibition will survey selected highlights from the history of the School’s artistic and cultural achievements. Drawn from the Christchurch Art Gallery, University or Canterbury and other private and public collections, the Art School 125 exhibition will feature work by former students such as Margaret Stoddart, Shane Cotton, Ronnie van Hout, William Sutton, Leo Bensemann, Francis Upritchard and Bill Culbert. Designed in chapters, such as early modern, regionalist painting and 1960s- 70s expressionism, the exhibition will cluster work by style and/or conceptual approach. The exhibition will feature works in a range of media – paintings, sculpture, film, photography, printmaking and the earlier decorative arts that were taught at Canterbury – and be accompanied by a website publication looking at the role of the Art School in the lives of many significant New Zealand artists. Of Deities or Mortals 16 November 2007 to Jan/Feb 2008 Titled after a line in John Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, Of Deities or Mortals takes eight objects from the University of Canterbury’s James Logie Memorial Collection and invites eight contemporary New Zealand artists to respond to the works. Sara Hughes, Jamie Richardson, Neil Pardington, Reuben Paterson, Marian Maguire, Liyen Chong, Tony de Lautour and Francis Upritchard have each chosen a work from the Collection and their mixed media response will be displayed along with the original ancient treasures. This meeting of old and new will bring interesting and unexpected juxtapositions, and is anticipated to throw new light on objects from the ancient past. Apulian askos The James Logie Memorial Collection Canosa, Southern Italy is recognised as one of the 3rd century BCE Logie Collection, Classics Departme nt, University finest collections of ancient treasures of Canterbury in the Southern Hemisphere. The Collection was founded by Marian K. Steven, who from 1949 to 1977 was a lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in Classics at the University. She was married to James Logie, Registrar of the University