Art

Come on Doll Face

Come on Doll Face

Col­lage seems a use­ful meta­phor for con­tem­por­ary life in the digit­al age. A col­lage dis­rupts accep­ted mean­ings by tak­ing found images clipped from their ori­gin­al con­text, then mix­ing them up and […]

Desire hath no rest

Desire hath no rest

No ideas but in things,” wrote Amer­ic­an poet Wil­li­am Car­los Wil­li­ams in 1946. As I talked to Vivi­en Atkin­son, Petra Stueben and Kelly McDon­ald about their ornament/artefact exhib­i­tion at Toi […]

Histories of harm

Histories of harm

Enjoy Pub­lic Art Gal­lery has been on the cul­tur­al land­scape in Wel­ling­ton since 2000. If you haven’t been there, it’s on level one at 147 Cuba Street, and was established […]

What is suburban depravity?”

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I was in a grey mood the after­noon I vis­ited Yvonne Todd’s Creamy Psy­cho­logy exhib­i­tion at City Gal­lery (on until 1 March). In the back­ground of my day, a lover […]

Cups, plates and bowls

Cups, plates and bowls

A couple of months ago, Raewyn Atkin­son and I met at Golding’s to talk about her new work, cur­rently on view at the Bowen Gal­ler­ies. It was a light September […]

Arts — Toi Pōneke: Te Aro’s creative hub

Arts — Toi Pōneke: Te Aro’s creative hub

Hid­den in the depths of Wellington’s cre­at­ive dis­trict lies a treas­ure trove of multi-tal­en­ted people ded­ic­ated to the arts. The Toi Pōneke Arts Centre com­prises two rather unas­sum­ing build­ings on […]

At the Māori Art Market

At the Māori Art Market

Art mar­kets and art fairs have been part of the inter­na­tion­al land­scape of con­tem­por­ary art for about 30 years. In Aotearoa they are a rel­at­ively new phe­nomen­on — the Auckland […]

The Modest Modernists

The Modest Modernists

When I worked at City Gal­lery Wel­ling­ton in 2001, we bor­rowed some Janet Paul works for an exhib­i­tion from Kaye Roberts. Kaye ran the Brook­er Gal­lery in Kel­burn for many […]

Touchy feely

Touchy feely

I first encountered Seung Yul Oh’s work at Te Papa six years ago. Four Oddooki 2008 pieces were installed in the sculp­ture court on the rooftop. Seung describes these large […]