Julian Dashper: Professional Practice 23 July – 28 August 2010
PUBLIC EVENTS
Saturday 24 July, 1pm Exhibition curator Ariane Craig Smith gives a tour of the gallery and discusses her selection of works for Professional Practice. Craig Smith is an independent curator and writer, and is Visual Arts Manager for the 2011 Auckland Festival 2009.
Saturday 31 July, 1pm Walking tour: Microsites and Dashper's Auckland A tour of Microsites: Auckland City's public art projects in the Learning Quarter, and Julian's favourite modernist landmarks, led by Linda Tyler, Director, Centre for New Zealand Art Research and Discovery. No charge, gusfishergallery@auckland.ac.nz for bookings.
Saturday 7 August, 1pm Jim Barr talks of his long association with Julian Dashper as both a collector and collaborator.
Friday 13 August, 7pm Sound performance: A live performance in the gallery's Grand Foyer from Dunedin-based Gate and Rachel Shearer. Gate's first new LP in over a decade, A Republic of Sadness, has just been released on US label Ba Da Bing. $10 entry, no bookings.
Saturday 14 August, 1pm Artist talk: Artist and musician Michael Morley (Gate/The Dead C) responds to the exhibition with a talk about the use of records in his own practice, his connections to Julian Dashper's record-making, and relationships between painting and music, image and sound.
Saturday 21 August, 1pm John Reynolds, Judy Darragh and Ian Jervis, friends and peers of Julian Dashper, pay tribute in a group discussion chaired by exhibition curator Ariane Craig Smith
Saturday 28 August, 1pm Screening of the Simone Horrocks and Richard Flynn produced documentary, MY SPACE, created with Julian Dashper as an intimate dialogue between the artist and his work. Originally premiered on YouTube in accordance with Dashper's wishes, it tracks his activities in mid-2008 and runs for 70 minutes. Introduced by Simone Horrocks.
All exhibitions and events are free and take place at the Gus Fisher Gallery unless otherwise noted.
THE GUS FISHER GALLERY GALLERY HOURS The Kenneth Myers Centre Tuesday - Friday 10am - 5pm 74 Shortland St Saturday 12pm - 4pm Auckland, New Zealand Closed Public Holidays
17th Biennale of Sydney - The Beauty and the Distance Biennale of Sydney, Sydney 12 May � 1 August 2010
Christian Jankowski. Production photograph of Tableau Vivant TV.
Press Release:
The art work will consist of TV Journalists reporting on the production of an artwork which will become the artwork itself � reporting 'live from the inside' of art production. The journalists will find different theater-like settings, staged in the style of a tableau vivant with "frozen" artists, actors and people that in fact work for the biennale. The TV-journalists are requested to inform the public about the situations they are facing, ( e.g. the location the happening takes place, the activity that is represented by the participants of the tableau vivant) in the style of a reporter reporting live from the site of action. Their reports will form part of Christian Jankowski�s video work shown at the Biennale in a work that reflects on the creation of art, journalism, and the media-spectacle of large cultural events such as biennales. The art work will consist of TV Journalists reporting on the production of an artwork which will become the artwork itself � reporting 'live from the inside' of art production. The journalists will find different theater-like settings, staged in the style of a tableau vivant with "frozen" artists, actors and people that in fact work for the biennale. The TV-journalists are requested to inform the public about the situations they are facing, ( e.g. the location the happening takes place, the activity that is represented by the participants of the tableau vivant) in the style of a reporter reporting live from the site of action. Their reports will form part of Christian Jankowski�s video work shown at the Biennale in a work that reflects on the creation of art, journalism, and the media-spectacle of large cultural events such as biennales.
Play On is the first in an occasional series of curated
exhibitions designed to investigate the relationships between sound and
art, generated from the Adam Art Gallery’s unfolding Sound Check
research programme. For this exhibition curator Christina Barton brings
together four major works produced in the 1990s by leading New Zealand
contemporary artists, and stages these referentially-rich installations
alongside a newly commissioned work.
My favorite thing about art is that it seems impossible, but turns out to be doable. I think the impossibility hangs around even though I don't notice it any more, like the possible and the impossible are the same thing sometimes. How? Well these objects are purely 100 percent subjective, subjective objects. To get a bit technical, before they get written back into language -fully loaded with meaning-, before that, between being made and taking on meaning, they're psychotic objects, real but still alien to language.
Why take on 1980's new-vision? maybe because we're still in the ideology of capitalism, which pretends to have no ideology, perhaps so no-one will notice it's dead. What do I mean by 80's new-vision? I mean work that's very serious and isn't serious, or precious perhaps if you're not comfortable with contradictions. Put the precious into either slot, it's fine, we're all friends here. It's like we're searching without having anything to search for. The wonderful thing has already happened and we want it to happen again, but this time for real. Was the last time real? If something's already happened we might be able to fix it so it never happened.
What am I talking about about? How structures have their own meanings, that can fail or carry through on unexpected criteria; criteria over which you have no control and never thought about or thought could matter.
New work from Ava Seymour created while at the McCahon Residency in Titirangi. Show runs through until 1 August 2010 at the Lopdell House Gallery. PINK ROCK, 2009. Edition of 3.
Also now showing as part of Play On, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
The Centre for Drawing is delighted to announce two events to coincide with Visiting Hood Fellow Peter Robinson's residency in the project space at Wimbledon College of Art. Peter's residency has been funded by the University of Auckland Hood Fellowship and is the third in a series of exchanges between fine-art practitioners from The Centre for Drawing UAL and collaborating Australian/ New Zealand institutions.
Consistent with Robinson's manipulation and distortion of the gallery apparatus is his decision to disrupt the temporal conventions of the exhibition format. For the first week of the exhibition the work can only be viewed from outside the space. A 'midview' will be held at this stage of project, from which time the audience will have access to the installation. He plans to make at least one major intervention to the work during second phase of the exhibition.
Pae White, Smoke Knows, 2009. Cotton and polyester, 114 × 258 in. (289.6 × 655.3 cm).
Ignoring traditional boundaries between the applied and fine arts, Pae White encourages viewers to take a deeper look at familiar encounters and ordinary objects. In 2006, White began creating tapestries with photographic images of crumpled aluminum foil and plumes of smoke. Still, Untitled, one of her most recent smoke tapestries, stages what White describes as the cotton's "dream of becoming something other than itself" by contrasting an image of something immaterial with the physicality of fabric. This vision of an ephemeral moment suspended in space—the slight and fleeting unfurling of smoke monumentalized in the heroic tradition of tapestries—transforms an everyday image into a seductive evocation of transience and longing.
In Raw Attempts Auckland based artist Richard Maloy treats ARTSPACE as both a gallery and a studio space. For a period of 85 days, from the first day of installation through to the last day of the exhibition, Maloy is developing large scale sculptural forms daily within the gallery. In doing so he responds to a set of self-imposed restrictions which in turn respond to the materials and physical site. Working unseen at night and in gallery downtime, the resulting changes become apparent to regular visitors over time, conjuring up glimpses of the process of making.
Documentation of the evolution of Richard's project is viewable at
The Fulbright Wallace Arts Trust Award has been set up in partnership between Fulbright New Zealand and The James Wallace Arts Trust.The award recognises the achievement and potential of an outstanding mid-career or senior New Zealand visual artist by providing a unique opportunity to undertake a three-month residency at Headlands Center for the Artsin Sausalito, California.
'All I Want to Be is a Sculpture' 1800 x 1500mm colour photograph
"Through September 13, 2009, Witte de With holds a major solo exhibition by Billy Apple®. Comprising two parts, A History of the Brand and Revealed / Concealed, the exhibition extends into public space with two billboard commissions of Billy Apple®'s works. These large-scale works insert themselves into the visual fabric of the city through September 13." http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=198
June 26, 2009 / September 13, 2009 Curated by Zoe Gray & Nicolaus Schafhausen
"Building upon his exhibition A History of the Brand on the 3rd floor, this reveals a different side to his practice. For this project, Billy Apple will transform Witte de With's 2nd floor, as an architectural intervention that continues his ongoing institutional critique." http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=197
lauregenillard@gmail.com www.lauregenillard.com T + 44 (0) 20 7323 6523 wed / sat 14 – 18 PM
Exhibition dates: 24th April – 18th June 2009 Private view: Thursday 23rd April 6 – 8 PM Opening hours: Wed - Sat 2 – 6 PM
The gallery is pleased to present two painters John Nixon (b. 1949) living in Melbourne, Australia and Julian Dashper (b. 1960) based in Auckland, New Zealand, who have exhibited in our Foley street location back in 1997. Both are concerned with 'painting' as a subject rather then a process, opening up the lexicon of possibilities for painting in general, painting not as a vehicle for personal narrative but a subject in itself.
John Nixon sees his role as artist as a producer not of consumer goods but of ideas, methods, strategies, information, research and demonstration. The function of the artist is to act as a laboratory of ideas of the experiment of art and as such he created 30 years ago an umbrella name for such a development, EPW: Experimental Painting Workshop. One project was set in the colour orange, EPW: Orange, originally a five year plan to produce orange paintings which ended up becoming a total oeuvre.
The paintings exhibited here are part of EPW: Polychrome, colour stripe paintings but under the banner of Applied Painting, a project looking at various possibilities for painting like theatre sets, costumes, colour music compositions, wall-paintings and here particularly examining colour flags. A series of three primary colours and three secondary colours come randomly mixed with black or silver, letting colour systems and randomness co-exist.
Julian Dashper's work focuses on the histories, theories and more general or popular ideas of abstraction (in particular abstract painting), conceptualism and minimalism as a working methodology. The geographical positioning of New Zealand globally and how his country receives and disseminates visual information is also a core subject in Dashper's work. His practice manifests itself in various forms, including paintings, unique photographs of paintings, found objects that he infuses with abstract images.
For his exhibition here, Dashper will show new works based on the legendary pieces of Barnett Newman entitled 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue' as well as other works.
Opening 28 March, a new Adam Art Gallery exhibition documents activities undertaken by artist Billy Apple in New York between 1969 and 1973.The exhibition focuses on a short but intense period in the artist's career, when he operated a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street. Over the course of four years he created a venue for artists to produce works that tested and re-defined the nature of sculpture, at a time when the art scene in New York was beginning to be galvanised by such radical gestures.
This exhibition draws on the artist's substantial archive to present photographs, slides, video, film, artefacts and ephemera that have survived from the 1970s.
Adam Art Gallery Victoria University of Wellington Gate 3, Kelburn Parade PO Box 600, Wellington 6140 New Zealand Tuesday – Sunday, 11am - 5pm FREE ENTRY + 64 4 463 5489 / + 64 4 463 5229 adamartgallery@vuw.ac.nz www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgallery
Henry Moore, Bronze Form, 1985-6, Salamanca Lawn, Botanic Gardens, Wellington, Gifted to the City of Wellington by Fletcher Challenge Ltd through Wellington City Council's Arts Bonus Scheme in partnership with the Wellington Sculpture Trust, 1987. Photo: Stephen Rowe
BILLY APPLE (NEW ZEALAND/UNITED STATES) LESS IS MOORE SATURDAY 28 MARCH 2009, 00.00-23.59 SALAMANCA LAWN, BOTANIC GARDENS, WELLINGTON
www.onedaysculpture.org.nz
Taking the Henry Moore sculpture in Wellington's Botanic Gardens as its starting point, Billy Apple will question the role and fate of art in public space through an action which addresses the history and intentions of public sculpture.
Commissioned by Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington
This show places the paintings of Dorothy Napangardi and John Reynolds in conversation. An experimental Warlpiri artist from Mini Mina, Napangardi paints her country without recourse to traditional family iconography, inventing her own language to portray her country. Her paintings are filigrees of dotted lines that optically expand and contract, collide and implode. 'Her view is constantly changing: one painting giving an aerial perspective; the next being as if she has placed a microscope to the ground.' Auckland painter John Reynolds is known for his drawing-based paintings, many of which present fields of broken lines. Reynolds is known for mashing abstraction and language, conflating history painting and landscape, interweaving the 'primitive' and the digital, and playing on withheld meaning.
Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling Auckland University Press
Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation is the first substantial survey of the work of New Zealand's leading abstract painter, Milan Mrkusich. At the beginning of his career in the 1940s, Mrkusich faced widespread antagonism towards abstraction and relied on his work for the innovative design firm Brenner Associates in order to make a living. But by the early 1970s, he had established himself at the forefront of modernist developments in New Zealand art, held in high esteem by critics and artists for his resonant, mesmerising fields of colour. This sumptuously produced book traces Mrkusich's career over 60 years, from the early gouaches on paper, through the acclaimed Emblems and Corner series, to recent work where he approaches colour as an open field of discovery.
Many-hued, vibrant and strong, Milan Mrkusich's abstract paintings have impressed viewers for half a century. Curated by Alan Wright and Ed Hanfling, this selection of over twenty major paintings provides a new reading of Mrkusich as an alchemical transformer of media and materials. This major survey exhibition provides a unique opportunity to study firsthand the deployment of symbolic form, line and colour in Mrkusich's painting over four decades. Considered one of New Zealand's greatest living artists, this will be the first exhibition of Mrkusich's work in a public gallery since 1996.
Admission free
The Gus Fisher Gallery 74 Shortland Street, Auckland Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday, 12-4pm; closed Public Holidays
Pipilotti Rist's lush multimedia installations playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality. MoMA commissioned the Swiss artist to create a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum's Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the massive 7,354 cubic metre space, or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 St, New York, NY 10019
Certain Words Drawn: John Reynolds continued, designed by Inhouse Design won Gold at this years' BeST Design Awards.
The BeST Design Awards are a national award programme of the Designers Institute of New Zealand, recognising New Zealand's best graphic, product and spatial design.
Certain Words Drawn is available for sale through Parsons Bookstore.
RICHARD MALOY / SHOWING AT THE FILM ARCHIVE, AUCKLAND
NEW WORK OLD WORK 8 OCTOBER - 1 NOVEMBER, 2008
In the exhibition Old Work, New Work the Film Archive brings together a selection of seven video works produced in the last decade by artist Richard Maloy, beginning with early works created during his time as a sculpture student at Elam school of Fine Arts. This collection of videos progresses through to his latest work made during his recent residency at Art Space Sydney. All Maloy's video works have a strong emphasis on performance which explore his interest in the body as a site for art making. Through the use of video documentation private acts are discovered and made public. www.fimarchive.org.nz
Peter Robinson has slipped the rug from under Aotearoa New Zealand's identity politics and critical fetishes for nearly two decades. Now manipulating that definitive material of disposable culture – polystyrene – the artist has turned his aggressive humour and formal concerns towards the transformations of internal architectural spaces within a critique of global consumerist excesses.
Snow Ball Blind Time is Robinson's most recent and expansive project, commissioned by and presented only at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The work harnesses the language of the spectacular, it inhabits the converted cinema building, devouring the internal spaces of the building with formal wit, critical bite and comic giganticism.
Curated by Gallery Director, Rhana Devenport, Snow Ball Blind Time occupies the entire 574 square metres of the Gallery. The installation responds to and engages with the Gallery's seven interconnecting internal spaces to form a vast spatial drawing. This is only the second time since the opening exhibition in 1970 by Leon Narbey, that the entire Gallery has been offered to an artist in a single commissioned work.
Robinson's practice has investigated the complexities of interracial politics within consumerist landscapes in a provocative, controversial and chimerical manner. His current work engages with issues and concepts related to democracy, freedom and post-industrial production in relation to social responsibility and the environment within a language of dangerous and romantic beauty.
The use of expanded polystyrene foam as a material is something that Robinson has interrogated over recent time, however his work has taken a significant shift in direction since late 2006 (ACK at Artspace, Auckland), seen in a series of exhibitions in Auckland, Berlin, Christchurch, Melbourne, Sydney and Wellington. Robinson will push this new approach to materiality, form, consumerism and psycho-architectural space to massive and inexorable scale in Snow Ball Blind Time.
From June 20 until July 6, 2008, The Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN) will be hosting its own Biennale of Sydney exhibition. The exhibition titled "The Most Meaningful Art of Our Time" (What Goes Around Comes Around), will use satire to confront the current tendency in international art – of which Biennales are a prime manifestation - to attempt to encapsulate and therefore relativise an excessive degree of cultural difference. The latter part of the exhibition's title punningly refers to the actual subtitle of the upcoming Biennale of Sydney, Forms That Turn and transforms this benignly innocuous phrase into a loaded and comically vengeful subtext.
Julian Dashper has been included in a survey exhibition, curated by Phong Buiof, of the last 5 years of MINUS SPACE http://www.minusspace.com/ at PS1 Contemporary Art Center http://www.ps1.org (NYC) this American fall.
The catalogue including images from the exhibition and additional images from the groundworks series will be published shortly. Culbert's installations see the transformation of domestic debris into poetic vehicles for ideas and states of being. Working with materials such as light bulbs, fluorescent tubes, plastic bottles, lampshades and suitcases, Culbert explores the dynamic interplay between light and shadow, between luminescence, space and visual perception. Govett-Brewster Director Rhana Devenport describes Culbert as "a conjurer of light". "Deftly articulated, his installations harness ordinary light sources and exist as reminders of the power of material transience and immaterial imagination," she says. The two new works are View West Taranaki and Flat Lighthouse. View West Taranaki, employees recycled Samsonite-style suitcases, sourced through a nationwide appeal, and electric light. Flat Lighthouse, uses demolition materials and devices concerned with daylight within a building, which will be lit by interior artificial lighting. Flotsam 1992, first exhibited in Europe and last year at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, sees a slick of discarded plastic bottles and fluorescent lights across the gallery floor. Culbert began working with light as a medium in the late 1960s. Trained as a painter, he saw it as a way of extending beyond the constraints of a canvas. Since this time, through photography and installation Culbert's extensive body of work has offered a consistent exploration of light and shadow in a poetic and personal way. Devenport says, "Bill Culbert has been an ever present source of inspiration to generations of artists in New Zealand, England and France". Born in Port Chamers, Otago, Culbert has lived between London and the South of France for over fifty years. He has exhibited widely in Europe, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand often working in vast scale. Within New Zealand his large-scale works include the neon piece SkyBlue 2006 in Wellington's Post Office Square and a recent collaboration with Ralph Hotere, Void 2006, which inhabits a multi-storey space within Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.
Bill Culbert 'Pacific Flotsam' collection Christchurch Art Gallery
Bill Culbert 'View West Taranaki' collection Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Bill Culbert 'Flat Lighthouse' courtesy Sue Crockford Gallery
It's 10am on November 3rd and a small, tired looking crowd stand on the rooftop of Ming Tower on Division Street, Chinatown. We have been invited here, to the roof of the artist Christian Jankowski's apartment, to witness Rooftop Routine an early morning collaborative performance that is part of PERFOMA 07.
Just across from us on an adjacent rooftop is a Chinese woman stood amid bits of junk, walls of graffiti, discarded chairs and cans. She is dressed in red and is hula-hooping for all her worth rocking slightly back and forth, with both arms in the air, her palms toward her. Back on our roof thirty seconds later someone excitedly points in another direction just west of the original hula-hooper; another hula-hooper has been spotted doing the same routine. Then another. All in all the Chinese woman sets off a hula-hooping chain reaction that involves about 20 people and stretches in a three block radius around us.
Combined, the gyrating, sports-clad hula-hoopers are beautifully at
odds with the grey New York morning, with its loud and busy rush hour
streets, looming Uptown skyline and litter strewn Chinatown rooftops.
The shared, simple arm gestures of the hula-hoopers, which change
variously from waving arms up and down and turning palms inside and
out, move out sequentially from the Chinese woman, travelling beyond
any one individual hula-hooper's body or sightline. This autonomy of
movement gives the routine itself a visceral and contagious quality or
choreography that moves through, but is independent of, the bodies of
the hula-hoopers. Spreading like a happy rash over the rooftops, each
change in the hula-hoop workout create links, making tangible the
physical and conceptual bonds that bind us here together; this project,
these buildings, these bodies.
The basis for Rooftop Routine was
Jankowski looking out of his apartment window to discover his
neighbour, Suat Ling Chua, doing her daily 40 minute hula-hoop workout
on the roof of her apartment opposite. It is outside the frame of this
project that spying on what your neighbour gets up to as part of her
personal fitness regime might be a dubious starting point for a
performance. Also not in the picture is why Suat Ling Chua was
hula-hooping on her roof in the first place and whether or not
hula-hooping is actually a sport, it is also unclear what Suat Ling
Chua's actual level of input or personal investment in the project is
(aside from being the lead hula-hooper). All this is of interest, but
what really matters is that the artist eventually found, and initiated
contact with, Suat Ling Chua and the rest, as they say, is history.
The
coming together of the community of Chinatown and New York's
contemporary art world is not something new or unique. Chinatown, one
of the remaining parts of New York to retain its (Chinese) inhabitants
and distinct (Chinese) flavour, is also home to many New York artists -
including Jankowski - who live or keep art studios in the area. In
recent history, this mix of low rent, available space, immigrant
communities and artists has inevitably signalled areas in danger of
impending corporate development or gentrification. Whether or not this
is the immediate future for Ming Tower such local geographic and
economic concerns seem important to Rooftop Routine. Seen in this
political light, Jankowski's deceptively simple human chain of
hula-hoopers is the perfect cover for a performative restoration of
neighbourhood links that highlight the area's distinct blend of
community, architecture and art that might just keep the developers at
bay for a while longer.
May 17, 2008- September 7, 2008 Pae White plays exuberantly with the boundaries between art and design. She is influenced by all things Californian—from West Coast modernism, to the glitz of Hollywood, to the cult of sunshine and leisure. White looks carefully at the objects that populate our world, with equal interest in popular culture and "high" art. She has an amazing ability to transform materials: her wonderfully hybrid objects claim a quirky social space. White's hypnotic paper mobile, for example, is partly a hip, formal play on modernism; partly libertarian decoration; partly a brilliant evocation of nature. Might it be a metaphor for a sunlit rain shower? a windswept flock of birds?
White amplifies the "artfulness" of everyday things, to use her term. Books, advertisements, barbeque grills, a shopping bag, even a theatre curtain become the objects of her witty elaborations and re-constructions. She looks far beyond the question posed by Charles Eames: "Who ever said that pleasure wasn't functional?"
Pae White is one of the most significant women artists participating in the international dialog about the intersection of art and design today. She embraces a wide range of artistic traditions, from the work of the Bauhaus to Charles and Ray Eames to Isamu Noguchi. Born and raised in Pasadena, White uses a palette inspired by the era of the 1970s, for example the floral scarves of Vera and the anti-war posters of Sister Mary Corita Kent.
The catalog accompanying this exhibition is the first major U.S. museum publication on White's art, which is widely shown abroad. Designed in close consultation with White, it includes an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and texts by Cassandra Coblentz, implementing curator, and Marilu Knode, originating curator and now assistant director, F.A.R. [Future Arts Projects], Arizona State University, Tempe.
Inflatable islands; a cast metal thylacine with a stuffed toy sensibility; an animal trap and trees make up Caroline Rothwell's installation, Blowback.
The works in Blowback suggest undiscovered territories somewhere between Dr no's technosonic islands, enlarged mass-produced toys and strange drawings by eighteenth-century voyagers.
Industrial urban materials are processed by hand into large-scale distortions of nature to create an other-worldly yet strangely familiar environment.
Pae White's Metafoil
marks the boundary and the meeting between the stage and the seating
area, between the performance and the public and between fiction and
reality. The woven textile has been developed through a digital
process in several stages. A photograph of light-sensitive foil was transferred to a loom by using
digital technology and woven in matte cotton. An illusion of
reflections and forms has been created through the use of colour. From
close quarters the surface has a rich texture – from a distance a
spatial, metallic composition is revealed.
Richard Maloy will be artist in residence at Artspace Sydney 12 February to the 9 May 2008. The three month residency will be used to create new works, at the same time as creating connections with artists, curators and gallerists in Sydney. The residency was made possible with a $10,000 Creative New Zealand Creative and Professional Development grant.
Billy Apple, The Art Circuit Auckland Art Gallery, Main Gallery forecourt Sunday 16 December, 12pm – free
A free public sound performance featuring motorcycles from The Billy Apple Historic Racing Collection. These grand prix bikes come with both professional racing and art pedigrees. They have been exhibited in public art galleries throughout New Zealand and raced by legendary riders including John Surtees, Hugh Anderson and Aaron Slight. This Billy Apple event curated by Andrew Clifford pays tribute to Auckland’s mid-town art circuit, which focuses on the Auckland Art Gallery. It is the last work to be staged on the gallery’s forecourt.
Billy Apple (b. 1935) has been a practicing artist for over five decades. He is one of New Zealand's best known and internationally acclaimed avant–garde figures, who made his reputation in London and New York, exhibiting alongside artists such as David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Dan Flavin. He is one of the original pop art generation before becoming a central figure in the evolution of conceptual art.
Billy Apple (then known as Barrie Bates) studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959-62 on a New Zealand government scholarship. After several trips across the Atlantic beginning in 1961, he moved permanently to New York in 1964. It was here that he was one of the pioneers of using emerging technologies such as neon, laser light, Xerox (in collaboration with GT&E and Xerox Corporation of America) in art-making. In 1969 he founded New York's second artist-run alternative space, his self-named gallery Apple, one of only seven in that era. A retrospective of his work was held at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1974 and in 1977 he had his first exhibition at New York's Leo Castelli Gallery, one of the most important dealer galleries of the twentieth century.
Billy Apple toured New Zealand twice in the 1970s, showing work in public institutions and dealer galleries. His permanent return to New Zealand was heralded by the Good as Gold retrospective, which opened at Wellington City Gallery in 1991 before touring to the Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth and the Auckland Art Gallery. In 2006 he was prominently featured in the Auckland Art Gallery's presentation of the Tate's Art & the 60s exhibition. His works are held in numerous international collections and institutions and he continues to exhibit prolifically.
Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) flew Billy Apple over for the opening of Australia's first major Andy Warhol retrospective. Billy met Andy in the summer of 1962 and exhibited with him in New York. He is being interviewed here by Channel 10's media team for the evening news.
Richard Frater's "In a Nutshell' 2006 DVD video, 5 minutes, looped.
Richard presents a walnut to the camera. The walnut, his hands, the table top, the background are all a satisfying tone of brown or orange. The colour isn't really important but it makes it very beautiful and succinct. He opens the walnut and scoops out the nut. The nut disintegrates due to the way it's removed from the shell. So now here are the two sides of the nutshell and a pile of nut crumbs on the table. Richard squeezes the nut crumbs together into variously configured piles. He pushes the nut crumbs back into the shell. The oiliness of the nut covers his fingers and makes them shiny and wet looking. This is really good in relation to the smooth surface of the table top. His hands move off camera and manually alter the focus of the image. The plane of focus shifts to the background and to the foreground and back again. The nut sits on the table in focus along with the table around it, now blurry and out of focus as the background or foreground come into focus. The shifting of the focus plane brings the camera to mind in a really simple and nice way. And then here are these two hemispheres with their displaced/ replaced content. Volume and mass become something a little more tangible. And all of this sits on the table surface, all brown together, gravity in a way being the more silent partner, more silent even than the camera. Gravity of course is not a constant but rather a logic of moving and interrelated masses. And now things start moving gravity-less. Sliding around the table of their own volition. And of course this is not in relation to gravity's shifts, but video editing's little guises and manipulations. The machine can so lightly dispel the newly performed volumes and mass of the walnut. Here is a reality of things that becomes apparent as they move contrary to our expectations.
Conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste; this exhibition draws its name from economist Thorstein Veblens celebrated monograph, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In the social and economic system Veblen described, goods, production, and leisure activities are extreme distortions of individual physical, social and emotional needs. Since the democratization of consumption in the twentieth century, links between economics and desire, property and celebrity, visible leisure and detached cool are reinforced across the economic strata of society. The Leisure Class includes film, video and installation works by international and Australian artists who respond strongly to the contemporary packaging of leisure, consumption and lifestyle as social capital and markers of identity.
Media artist Matthieu Laurettes interventions into lifestyle television draw upon Guy Debords The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debords book and subsequent film pointed to economic revaluing of life as spectacle, an approach similar to contemporary parodies of commercial visual culture by Justine Cooper, Penelope Umbrico, Tony Cokes and David Rosetzky. The real-world effects of sixties-era countercultural critique are thrown into question through the ambiguous final explosion of Michelangelo Antonionis film Zabriskie Point 1970. In Aernout Miks Pulverous 2003, conspicuous waste " the flipside of conspicuous consumption " is staged in the quiet destruction of goods in a supermarket stockroom. Taste, emulation and arbitrary value are humorously played out in works by other filmmakers and artists including Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Nathalie Djurberg, Andrea Fraser, Oriana Fox, Lily Hibberd, Christian Jankowski, Rosalind Nashashibi, MarcO, Grant Stevens, Jacques Tati, Penelope Umbrico and Emile Zile.
Christian Jankowski Die jagd (The hunt) 1992/98 Video installation, television, articulated wall bracket, Betacam SP, 1:11 mins, colour, sound, exhibited on DVD Courtesy: Sue Crockford Gallery, New Zealand
A portable video captures German artist Christian Jankowski during his week-long quest in 1992 to eat only groceries shot with a bow and arrow in the supermarket. The work contrasts hunting and gathering with the unconscious engagement of supermarket shoppers with packaged goods and processed produce. The pace of the work is humorous - the artist ambles with bow, arrow and shopping trolley through the supermarket aisles, throwing into relief modes of attaining sustenance based on need. A close-up of the artist's trophies concludes the hunting excursion - spiked products including toilet rolls, ham and butter.
Buren's project is based on his conviction that the steel arch of the bridge is the only element that distorts the perfect harmony achieved by Frank Gehry between the Museum and the bridge, which is embraced and integrated into the building's architecture. As Buren puts it, the arch "is not visually connected to the elegance of Museum."
So his proposal concentrates on transforming the structure of the bridge, covering it with a colored "skin", as a sort of sculpture, thus modifying the shape of the bridge without affecting its original function in any way.
For his sculpture, Buren has chosen a vivid red to create a sharp contrast with the bridge's predominating green, while at the same time establishing a "chromatic connection" with the titanium scales of Gehry's building. The succession of black and white stripes on the edges acts as a counterpoint to the red.
The installation entails two types of lighting; one static that illuminates both sides of the "red sculpture"; the other a rather more dynamic, complex illumination located at the sides to give an effect of constant movement to the bridge's internal and external edges.
Sculpture Park at Frieze 2007 will be presented in the wonderful setting of the English Gardens, located a short walk to the east of the entrance to the fair.
The majority of the works in the park have been made for the Fair and all the work, with one exception, is from 2007. They include three life-size bronze statues by Christian Jankowski of street performers dressed as Che Guevara, Salvador Dali’s ‘anthropomorphic cabinet’ woman and a Roman legionnaire who calls himself ‘Caesar’.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen will present French Horns, Unwound and Entwined, 2005, two oversize stainless steel musical instruments painted bright yellow. Kader Attia has topped broken concrete columns with rusted metal fragments to create works that resemble decaying house foundations and distorted concrete trees. The work was inspired by houses the artist has seen in Algeria, his homeland, and comment on both the broken dreams of immigrants returning home and the architecture of the Parisian suburb (the Banlieues) where Attia grew up.
David Thorp, curator of Sculpture Park 2007 at Frieze Art Fair, commented “The Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair is a unique opportunity for the public to experience some of the very latest in contemporary art in a beautiful setting”.
John Reynolds: Speaking Truth to Power Commissioned by Laurence Simmons to provide a cover image for the Auckland University Press book Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink New Zealand John Reynolds then went on to produced a complete portfolio of works exploring aspects of intellectual life in New Zealand. Although reproduced in black-and-white for the book, this irreverent set of works will be shown in their full glory for the first time at The University of Auckland's Gus Fisher Gallery.
John Reynolds: I Tell You Solemnly John Reynolds will also produce a new site-specific work for the foyer in response to the gallery's dramatic architecture. I Tell You Solemnly borrows its name and texts from a poem by Anne Kennedy. This painted installation continues in the tradition of Reynolds' popular work Cloud, a consideration of the presence of language, which he produced for the 2006 Sydney Biennale.
Saturday 27 October, 1pm Film Screening: Questions for Mr Reynolds A free screening of the feature-length version (67 minutes) of Shirley Horrocks' documentary, which tracks artist John Reynolds through an extraordinary year with total behind-the-scenes access.
Saturday 17 November, 1pm Blackboard lecture: John Reynolds A blackboard presentation by John Reynolds will explore the texts in his I Tell You Solemnly installation.
Born in Port Chalmers,1935. Culbert left New Zealand in 1957 to
study at the Royal College of Art, London. He works in sculpture,
installation and photography, often in combination. The subject of his
work is light. His materials include light bulbs, lampshades,
fluorescent tubes, plastic bottles, wine glasses and suitcases. He
travels extensively and exhibits widely in Europe, Australia and New
Zealand. The solo exhibition Lightworks was toured by the City
Gallery,Wellington in 1997. Culbert represented New Zealand in the 1990
Sydney Biennale and collaborated with Ralph Hotere in Toi Toi Toi at
the Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, and the Auckland Art Gallery, 1999.
He lives and works in the South of France and in London.
The Japan Art Association has awarded its 2007 prizes, naming the sculptor Tony Cragg and painter Daniel Buren among its 2007 laureates. Other laureates include Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for architecture, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim in the category of music, and theater director and producer Ellen Stewart in the theater/film category.
The five awards, each consisting of ¥15,000,000 (about $130,000) and a
commemorative gold medal, are aimed at supporting "the development of
art and culture worldwide, according to the last wishes of Prince
Takamatsu," according to the association. They go to "artists who have
contributed significantly to the development of international arts and
culture."
Richard Maloy has work currently on show in 'Existence: life according to art' curator Leafa Wilson at the Waikato Museum. Included in the show are artists Dan Arps, Michael Parekowhai, Ricky Swallow, Yvonne Todd, Francis Upritchard, Ronnie van Hout and others. The show runs from 14 July - 14 October 2007. Existence explores ideas of how life came into being, how we exist and our ultimate destiny through paintings, installations and multi-media.
Daniel Buren will present a monumental site-specific artwork of his
signature striped flags in the large central courtyard at One Colorado,
a popular gathering place in the heart of Old Pasadena.
His installation, "A Colored Square in the Sky," will consist of a
fluttering field of more than 4,000 brilliantly colored triangular
orange and yellow flags suspended above this brick and cobblestone
public space. "Colored Square in the Sky" will be on view for three
months, from Saturday, August 11 to Sunday, November 11. Public
access to Buren's art installation and the One Colorado Courtyard are
free.
Questions for Mr Reynolds, a profile of artist John Reynolds, will be screened on TV One in the Artsville series on Sunday August 26 at 10.30 pm.
Directed by Shirley Horrocks, the documentary tracks Reynolds through an extraordinary year during which he creates 'Cloud' (his huge painted work at the Sydney Biennale), collaborates with architects to design a hotel in Auckland, reworks the iconic Swanndri for Karen Walker, tattoos a friend, appears as a character in a popular cartoon series, presents his 21st exhibition at the Sue Crockford Gallery, does Samuel-Beckett-style performances, and makes extraordinary large-scale landscape works with native species in Otago and the Kaipara. Inviting unpredictable answers, the 'questions' for John range from 'What is painting now?' to 'Where do ideas come from?'
A group exhibition entitled LIGHT TIME AND THREE DIMENSIONSincludes work by Alexander
Calder, Bill Culbert, Tara Donovan, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Donald
Judd, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg and
Coosje van Bruggen, Lucas Samaras, Joel Shapiro, Keith Sonnier, Kiki
Smith, and recent sculptural work by Jim Dine, Tim Hawkinson, James Turrell and Fred Wilson.
Featured works include an almost 12' tall sculpture of a leaning fork
with a meatball and spaghetti by Oldenburg, a fluorescent tube and bottle work by Culbert, a metal Calder mobile c.
1948, a new neon light work from Sonnier, and an Incomplete Open Cube
by LeWitt from 1974. LIGHT TIME AND THREE DIMENSIONSis on view through August 24, 2007.
Australia – and particularly the state of Queensland – is
experiencing a severe prolonged drought. Clean water is no longer taken
for granted. There are massive water restrictions and a plan to recycle
waste water, or 'grey water'. Another item that dominates the news is
race. There is great fear around immigration tied to terrorism. We
welcome people from other places if they are prepared to 'become'
Australian. What that means, however, is hard to define. These two
themes – the purity of our water and the purity our national essence –
have become subtly intertwined.
Grey Water
showcases works from different cultural viewpoints that address our
identification with water, and address the purity and pollution of
water. Hits of the show include Bill Culbert's Pacific Flotsam,
a scatter-installation – a sea fluorescent tubes and plastic bottles,
and Teresa Margolles's sublime soap-bubble blowing machines using water
used to wash down corpses in a Mexico morgue.
The full
line up is: Bill Culbert (NZ), Marian Drew (Australia), Lawrence
English (Australia) and Toshiya Tsunoda (Japan), Roland Fischer
(Germany), Peter Greenaway (Britain), Roni Horn (USA), Zhang Huan
(China), Abie Jangala (Australia), Rosemary Laing (Australia) with
Stephen Birch (Australia), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Jun
Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Vietnam) and Lawrence Weiner (USA).
Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander 10 August - 14 October 2007
Julian Dashper is one of New Zealand's most internationally successful contemporary artists.
His work focuses on the histories, theories and more general or popular ideas of abstraction, conceptualism and minimalism.
Dashper's practice manifests itself in various forms, including
paintings, unique photographs of paintings, found objects such as
drumkits which he infuses with abstract images.
The NZ group exhibition that Gretchen Albrecht and Bill Culbert are
included in - ULTRAMarte- Contemporary Art from New Zealand - has now
opened in its second venue in Spain at the CASAL SOLLERIC on Palma di
Majorca.
"Ultramarte – Contemporary Art from New Zealand", is an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by 6 prominent NZ artists.
The work of artists – Gretchen Albrecht, Bill Culbert, Pip Culbert,
Tony Lane, Fiona Pardington and James Ross – represents a cross-section
of current art practice and a wide range of artistic points-of-view. It
includes painting, sculpture, installation art and photography.
LAURENCE ABERHART has been at the forefront of New Zealand photography
since the late 1970s, and is recognised as a major international
figure. Like the paintings of Colin McCahon—an artist with whom
Aberhart is frequently paired—his photographs are a sustained
meditation on time, place and cultural history. They are also virtuoso
pieces of photographic craft.
This book is a landmark
in New Zealand art publishing. In a definitive overview of Laurence
Aberhart's work to date, 240 full-page reproductions of iconic
photographs of churches, marae, cemeteries, Masonic Lodges and other
subjects are accompanied by illuminating essays by leading New Zealand
art writers Gregory O'Brien and Justin Paton. O'Brien pursues the motif
of the horizon through Aberhart's work, considering the many journeys
that his career encompasses and the shelters and structures seen along
the way, while Paton focuses on the human presences that quietly
animate Aberhart's extraordinary body of work.
This beautifully crafted book brings the work of internationally
renowned New Zealand photographer, Laurence Aberhart, into sharp focus
with exquisite full-page reproductions and essays by leading art
writers Gregory O'Brien and Justin Paton.
A
major figure in this country's photographic arts, Aberhart is known for
his black and white images of Masonic lodges, churches, maraes and
cemeteries – a sustained meditation on time, place and cultural
history. O'Brien concentrates on Aberhart's preoccupation with horizon
lines, both in architecture and landscapes, and Paton discusses the
fleeting human traces present in this photographer's work.
The essays are an absolute pleasure to read, shedding light – and
levity – on Aberhart's oeuvre and tracing his visual and geographical
journey's throughout New Zealand. "The images reveal a willingness, on
the part of the photographer, to clock up miles on the kinds of roads
that would instantly affect the resale value of your car," writes
O'Brien. This is sure to be snapped up as one of the best books on a
New Zealand photographer to come out in recent times. ARTNEWS NEW ZEALAND Winter 2007
Some technical information about the printing of Aberhart
The plates in Aberhart are printed in tritone, with a tinted spot overgloss and matt seal:
1. The first black plate is slightly flatter than in single-colour black-and-white printing.
2. The tritone black captures solid blacks and details.
3. The warm grey plate captures the midtones.
4. The tinted spot overgloss warms and brightens the image area.
5. A matt seal over the whole page protects it from dust and damage.
Tritone
printing was chosen for this book after printing trials, because it
best captured the extraordinary intensity and detail, and subtle tones,
of Laurence Aberhart's photos. Duotone printing (black and warm grey)
is the standard (and cheaper) option for high quality photographic
printing. It was rejected because the reproductions looked distinctly
flatter in a straight comparison. Full colour (CMYK) reproduction was
also trialed, but rejected because it softened the images, especially
in areas of solid back or fine detail.
On 12 May 2007 City Gallery Wellington opened Laurence Aberhart,
a landmark exhibition in New Zealand photography. Over 200 iconic
photographs will be displayed in the most comprehensive overview of
Laurence Aberhart's work to date. The exhibition will tour NZ.
Publication 14 May 2007 ISBN 9780 86473 5560 Format hardback with dust jacket 270mm x 240mm rrp $125.00 Art, photography
Riverway Arts Centre, Townsville May 26 - June 24, 2007
Based on representations of the human skull, Poor Yorick is a
meditation on the fragility of life and a reminder to live life today
for tomorrow you might be gone. Artists include Ben Quilty, Imants
Tillers, Caroline Rothwell, Tim Storrier, Shaun Gladwell, Tim Silver,
Fiona Lowry, Mel O'Callaghan, Michael Lindeman, Oliver Watts, David
Griggs, Paul Wrigley and more.
2 August - 14 October
BloodLines: Art and the Horse
Hawksebury Regional Gallery
From The Man From Snowy River to 'the race that stops the nation', the
horse has played and continues to play an important role in Australian
culture and identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The
Hawkesbury, where the enthusiasm for all things equine includes
breeding, thoroughbred racing, endurance riding, polo, show jumping and
showing. This enthusiasm goes back to the earliest days of settlement,
when buyers and spectators from all over the colony regularly came by
special trains for the annual sales at Hobartville, a property which
continues as a horse stud to this day and boasts three Melbourne Cup
winners.
The 21st century hasn't yet begun, the century has to begin!
The next Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art will open on 17
September 2007. The project devised for this 9th edition by Stéphanie
Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist is a history book written by a number of
people. The history of a decade yet to be named; of a present that is
endlessly arriving.
The project is structured like a grand game, with rules for
selecting and casting the roles; a game in which some 50 “players” from
around the world are invited to invite an essential artist of this
decade. The ultimate purpose of this game, in which invitation is the
rule, is to produce together an original landscape, to rethink the
format and grammar of contemporary art biennials, and to create living
matter from the archaeology of now.
This history book, published on the occasion of the biennial, is
both the project's origin and its horizon. It is conceived as a space
open to different voices and trajectories. It will comprise essays by
philosophers, critics and historians, and the manifesto texts of each
player, centred on a particular vision of the present and of what is
happening on the contemporary creative scene. The dynamic system which
develops through the formation of this community, enables us to reach
beyond generational, geographical and thematic axes and to shift the
hierarchies and conventions of knowledge into a feedback loop.
