art and photography

A Living Response

June 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Ian Wedde, Gregory O’Brien & Bernadette Hall

Joanna Margaret Paul’s The Stations of the Cross, Church of St Mary, Star of the Sea, Port Chalmers

Joanna Paul was living at Port Chalmers in 1971, renting a little yellow house. She made meals for the local parish priest. I was teaching at St Dominic’s College in Dunedin. She was also a staff member there, teaching art. This was the year she married. The year Father Keane invited her to paint her own vision of The Stations of the Cross on the plaster walls of the little Catholic church. The art was celebrated for a while and then it seemed to disappear. [Read more…]

Put Yourself in My Place

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Chris Tse

Summer Grass by Ginny Sullivan (Steele Roberts, 2017), 72 pp., $19.99; Edgeland and Other Poems by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2018), 112 pp., $27.50; View from the South by Owen Marshall with photographs by Grahame Sydney (Vintage, 2018), 208 pp., $40

It feels somewhat reductive in 2019 to be framing a review of three New Zealand poetry books with the poets’ shared exploration of place and landscape, but here we are. However, that is not to say that these three books are themselves reductive in any sense. So much of our country’s art is rooted in the land – I can still hear my university lecturers exalting the pivotal role that our celebrated landscape has played in the development of our national literature and film history. And if it’s not our own land then it’s the far-flung places we Kiwis end up in, a shared wanderlust pushing us to escape the confines of our island nation, our isolation. [Read more…]

Engaging Photography

December 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

Gavin Hipkins: The Domain (Victoria University Press, 2017), 240 pp., $70

The monograph Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, released in November 2017 to mark the opening of the Dowse Art Museum’s largest-ever survey exhibition of the same name, is a beautifully produced, super-illustrated tome. It begins with three ‘meaty’ essays, ends with a plethora of historic texts, and contains 147 pages of colour plates (over half the book) in between. Significantly, it provides an opportunity to more singularly study the richly proliferative, multi-threaded and motif-circling practice of a senior New Zealand artist working across still and moving image in both gallery and cinema contexts. However, the non-indexed, non-thematic (and non-chronological) ordering of its wedge of colour plates might hamper that study at times. [Read more…]

Macpherson’s Part in the City

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017 by Mary Macpherson with an essay by Gregory O’Brien (Mary Macpherson and PhotoForum Inc., 2018), 44 pp, $35

Designated as PhotoForum 89. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 29 May to 22 July 2018 as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange’s famous quote comes to mind as I open the pages of Mary Macpherson’s new photographic book, The Long View: Auckland photographs 2014–2017.¹ Modestly sized, it presents 25 superbly coloured photographs of the city, and an essay by Gregory O’Brien. [Read more…]

In Counterpoint to the Music of Time

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Aberhart Starts Here by Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2018), 136 pp., $39.99

This catalogue is based on the Christchurch Art Gallery show of Aberhart’s early work (1975 to 1983 with one picture from 1986), from when he was living in Lyttelton and later working as an instructor at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art at Ilam.

My initial thought was to wonder: have we got to a point when everything that can be written about Laurence Aberhart has been written? Can we squeeze one more review out of this gigantic stack of beautiful work that he has shored up against the crumbling ruins of our civilisation? [Read more…]