Exhibition best viewed by torchlight
Walking through an art gallery, past a storage room, down the stairs and into a basement with a torch is all part of a Palmerston North art exhibition experience.
Palmerston North’s Thermostat Gallery on The Square is showing an exhibition where patrons have to go into the basement and shine torches on velvet paintings.
Artist Gary Freemantle said he had been working with velvet for nearly 20 years and a lot of the images were black, white and ghostly.
He said he was one day walking past the basement and thought it was the perfect space to display his work.
He chose to paint a collection that allowed people to come up with their own story for the characters.
Freemantle is showing another exhibition upstairs, of colour samples from earth around New Zealand.
‘‘People just say, ‘So what, it’s boring colour charts’, but the interesting part is that it’s from the earth.’’
Freemantle said the colour palette of the upstairs exhibition was bright, while the basement was the complete opposite.
One of the gallery’s owners, Simon Francis, said he was giving Freemantle a tour of the gallery and the toilets out the back of the building when he saw the stairs to the basement.
Francis said he had to clean 18 years of clutter out of the basement to open the space and hang the paintings.
‘‘It’s kind of an experience. [It’s] not just about looking at the pretty pictures.’’
Patron Heather Partel said the paintings jumped out at you in a different light when using torches in the dark.
The gallery is open 11am to 4pm, Wednesday to Friday, and 11am to 2pm on Saturdays.