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Transforming Death- A group Exhibition at Pumanawa Gallery

Transforming Death is a week-long exhibition at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora’s Pumanawa Gallery in October, held during Death Matters month. Ten local artists have been invited to create a series of work based on their own relationship with death, loss or grief - This is no small task. For all the artists this has been a...

Group of Seven

In August the Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru launched what I think might well be one of the most important exhibitions of the year. It’s a small show, but well chosen, curated by the Aigantighe’s Hamish Pettengell. It is both a surprise and delight. The exhibition Group of Seven recreates a critically well-received 1966...

Pahū! at Te Ara Ātea – A Group Exhibition at Rolleston’s New Library

Curated by Selwyn District Council’s Arts Programme Coordinator, Chol e Cull, Pahū! (to burst, explode, pop) is a group exhibition at Te Ara Ātea, the new public library which opened in Rolleston in December 2021. Pahū! is a series of large-scale works and installations by five artists: Judy Darragh,...

The Practical and Beautiful at the Ashburton Art Gallery

It was a surprise to visit Greenfield & Meharry’s collaborative exhibition, Alchemy at the Ashburton Art Gallery and to find myself thinking of that champion of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris and his legendary advice: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful,...

Canterbury Museum is planning the Move of the Century

The consultation began in 2019 with the community of Ōtautahi Christchurch and in 2022 the Canterbury Museum now has a remarkable and exciting vision for the rebuild and renovation of its building for its 2.3 million artifacts and objects. Following numerous meetings with many groups, its online survey and discussions with interested...

Little Reminders

Amidst the deluge that served as the July school holidays, I spent the fortnight in the dry warmth of the YMCA’s 4C Centre, an innovative space where young people can access an array of creative technology. With an assortment of 3D printers, a laser cutter, and plenty more gadgetry to explore, the 4C Centre was the perfect setting for a...

Marian Maguire- The Enlightenment Project – Creating a Map and Not a Narrative

Marian Maguire describes her exhibition, The Enlightenment Project as an endeavour that is without end. Exploring and making sense of documented histories of the Western world, its philosophies, advances in technology and dominating presence in the 21st century are all open for extensive reconsideration and review. ..

Dame Ngaio Marsh- Writer, Theatre Director and Contemporary Painter

Aotearoa’s best-known writer, Dame Ngaio Marsh is the subject of In search of Ngaio: Life and work of Dame Ngaio Marsh a survey exhibition at Tūranga central library. The exhibition encompasses Marsh’s work as a writer of crime novels, and also her time as a theatre director, mentor and contemporary painter, a member of The Group...

Thrash & Escalate, Nick Harte on film, music and art, The Devils, (1971)

Wound licking. Nuns biting nuns. Self flagellatory priests… Director Ken Russell’s cream and beige symphony to Satan may be “Lewd, wanton” in the words of the film, but also historically accurate in many respects. Aldous Huxley penned the novel The Devils of Loudun that this incantatory gob of ocular sorcery was based on, and Russell’s...

Bryan LEstrange- Gallery and Container Art in Sumner

It began post-quake in October 2011with approximately 160 shipping containers in Sumner, initially placed between land and sea as a barrier against the potential collapse of the hillside bordering Peacocks Gallop, yet equally doubling up as an outdoors art gallery. Container Art was founded by Sumner artist, gallery owner and curator,...

Ilam and CoCA Gallery- A Necessity for Critical and Curatorial Rigour

Low stakes at all costs is a peculiar yet not uncommon approach to exhibition programming. In SoFA Gallery’s symbolic return to the city centre, it feels like a lost opportunity at a time when there is a pressing need for our established art institutions to take the lead in exhibiting and commissioning critically engaged art. ...

Gretchen Albrecht, nine illuminations 1976 - 1978

In the late 1970s, shortly before a pivotal year-long sojourn to Europe and North America, renowned New Zealand painter Gretchen Albrecht produced a series of large colour-field abstracts, the acrylic paint stained into the canvas – a territory she had begun exploring in the early 1970s. Very few of these were shown at the time and the rest...

Pickpocket

Cantabrians should consider themselves officially in the gravy with this rare opportunity to enjoy a one-off screening of Pickpocket, from the curmudgeonly director who liked to refer to theatre as a “bastard art”. My personal introduction to the cinema of Robert Bresson was...

Operation Grapple

If you have an hour without the kids in Christchurch’s city centre, I urge you to spend time in this exhibition. When I visited, it was the school holidays, and I was grateful that I wasn’t one of the parents trying to track down their children as they raced around the Canterbury Museum. If you go to see Operation Grapple each...

Stefan Roberts’ Waterlog- A Photograph as a Faded Memory and Warning

For more than two decades Stefan Roberts’ photographs have insisted that our experience and memory of the world in which we live is far more than the realities that we believe give certainty to the familiarities of our lives. Rather than seeking out given representations and measured or reassuring images as generalisations of lived experience,...