Ten exhibitions worth seeing
September offers a range of exhibitions around the city that certainly won’t disappoint, says Warren Feeney.
Even the titles of Barry's works become part of her plan, avoiding place and time and denying any assurances about the location of her subjects.
If a metaphor is necessary to match the time of year, it could be transformation and the passage of time. Alternatively, renewing your familiarity with the city’s galleries is reason enough. The following recommendations are definitely worthy of attention.
Contemporary Christchurch at COCA (until November 6) brings together 13 local artists whose work is ‘‘linked to the city’’, and Pauline Rhodes’ contribution, Towards the Light, provides the best reason to visit.
Rhodes’ installation is site specific, readily accommodating itself within the space of the North Gallery and its challenging low lying ceiling.
Green wood rods, arch and follow the point of entry, directing attention to the surge of natural light at the end of the North Gallery’s vaulted skylight. Towards the Light fuels the big question: When will there be a major survey exhibition of Rhodes’ work?
With less than two weeks to go, In Modern Times at the Christchurch Art Gallery (until September 11) should not be missed. Exploring New Zealand’s belated response to European Modernism,
In Modern Times is a modest exhibition, but a highlight of the CAG’s reopening programme. The inclusion of Eileen Mayo’s, Art Deco-inspired linocut, Turkish Bath, is reason enough to visit.
In 1930, this English-born printmaker was creating works that took to Cubist theories about the reinvention of space with attitude. Turkish Bath is stylish, boisterously colourful and erotic. Arguably, the best work that she ever created.
Foundations, the Student Series exhibition at Ilam Campus Gallery (until September 8) takes an allinclusive view of drawing. Lines and marks on numerous and varying surfaces, materials, objects and canvases – all in the interest of testing ideas and the possibilities of making images.
Foundations looks like a smartly curated group show in which the diversity of approaches are all speaking a shared language. This is an exhibition with a genuine sense of excitement and energy about it. And not just about drawing, but the possibility of realising an idea in a work of art that is worthy of the time and attention.
Lyttelton-born painter Euan MacLeod has been painting this lonely figure stalking his landscapes for the past 32 years. Yet, being reacquainted again and again with its journey through MacLeod’s primeval landscapes always feels like a first-time experience. This time at PGgallery 192 (until September 17) the presence and implicit absence of MacLeod’s walking man continues to make perfect sense. Why is it so convincing? Because although his layering of paint on surface over surface may initially look impulsive, it is entirely deliberate and certain. The relationships between his subject and painterly gestures are a consummate performance, perfectly suited to the familiarity and strangeness of his imagery. MacLeod makes paintings that just won’t leave you alone for all the best reasons.
Christchurch printmaker Jane Barry exhibits new mono-prints at Qb Studios in Addington (until October 20).
Titled Some of the Things I Almost Saw, Barry’s prints manipulate architectural structures and the urban environment, enclosing space, mass and volume in uneasy and disconcerting images.
In her stark and monochromatic prints, even the titles of Barry’s works become part of her plan, avoiding place and time and denying any assurances about the location of her subjects. Prints like Perseverance and Walk the Line seem less about architecture and more about a state of mind.
Over the past five years, Mark Soltera’s canvases have become larger and larger. His current exhibition, Images End at 50 Works Gallery (until September 4) features his grandest work to date. Galaxy is 1.8 metres high and 6 metres long. But it is not just their immersive scale that is important.
Galaxy takes its subject from the artist’s experience of seeing the first screening of Star Wars in the Coronet Theatre in San Francisco in the mid-1970s.
Revealing something of this memory on transparent hessian cloth, Soltera creates an image that fluctuates between materialising and dissolving its subject. A fleeting memory that incessantly transpires and disappears.
Fiona Pardington’s Supernatural at the Jonathan Smart Gallery (until September 3) brings a lightness of atmosphere to her often all too-large photographs that is a welcome contrast to the darkly dramatic atmosphere greeting visitors at the entrance to her survey show at the CAG.
Plus there are stranger and more twisted images at the Smart Gallery, like Still Life with Fish Head in a Silver Chalice with Rautawhiri Flowers, Ripiro.
Pardington’s title is as lengthy and complex in its sound as the photograph’s deconstruction and reconsideration of the history of still life painting in Western art.
Carpe Librum: Seize the Book is a group exhibition at Art Box on St Asaph Street (until September 2) from staff and students at Ara Institute’s School of Art and Design.
Based on the idea that a book maintains an important status as an object in itself in our lives, Carpe Librum brings together decommissioned books from Ara’s library transformed into artworks inspired by their subject’s text.
Sam Lemon’s, The Little Book of Tea is a highlight, altering the experience of opening a book to reward the gallery visitor, not with words, but a purely sensory, visual treat of dark black tea leaves on an ochre board.
The exhibition of Philip Trusttum’s paintings at the Colombo (ongoing) from his 2015 series, Boo has been extended in both the number of works on display and their timeframe.
Twenty-two paintings by Trusttum comprehensively animate the gallery space in colourful and dynamic images.
A visual treat, the rampaging masked, madman and house cleaner in Boo, circles and dominates all four corners of the artist’s expansive canvases, materialising unexpectedly, head over heels from image to image.
The Crystal Chain Gang from Wellington return to The National (until September 24) with Clear Cut, an exhibition of new mixedmedia works in glass.
In a series of pieces assembled predominantly in glass and plaster, The Crystal Chain Gang, aka Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams, continue to stretch expectations about how glass can simultaneously operates as jewellery, sculpture and craft.
In works like Pop Rock, evolving hybrids of recycled glass become king-pin on a mountain of toothpaste-squeezed plaster, proudly and collectively intent on delivering their best visual pun.