Turumeke Harrington, Tā, Tau
WAIRAU MĀORI ART
GALLERY
WHANGĀREI
—
12.04.2025–27.07.2025
With a background in industrial design, Turumeke Harrington is adept at zooming in on simple forms or motifs, duplicating them on end and across diverse media until they become a kind of memetic cryptogram. Felled, at Page Galleries, repeated images of logged trees, imagining a playful, multimedia reforestation of Te Aro Pā’s swamplands. The exhibition was populated by trees as powder-coated steel sculptures, as Indian ink drawings on paper in which the trunk wounds gaped ghoulishly like Munch’s The Scream, and engraved on sterling-silver earring charms wrapped in feathers like the novelty possum-fur penis warmers sold in souvenir shops. For Home Ground / Kororiwhatepō, also at Page Galleries, she fashioned herself as a painter-brickie, presenting a series of ‘wall’ paintings that used acrylic and whenua pigments to emulate stacked stone bulwarks and consider the housing crisis’s impact on tangata whenua.
Tā, Tau, a new installation commissioned by Wairau, will follow these lines of inquiry and dissent through tussock-grass forms, contemplating landscape art in relation to landlessness, the contemporary politics of shelter and the artist’s whakapapa.
Jennifer Laracy, Parure
SEASON
TĀMAKI MAKAURAU
AUCKLAND
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20.03.2025–19.04.2025
This exhibition from Taranaki-based jeweller Jennifer Laracy looks back to a tiara her grandfather made as a gift for Dame Te Atairangikaahu, Māori Queen from 1966 to 2006. Due to tikanga that restricted certain designs from being worn on or near to the head, the tiara was ultimately deconstructed and its parts reassembled into new pieces. With Parure, Laracy seeks to rework its story, too.
‘Parure’ in English refers to a set of jewels meant to be worn together. In te reo Maori, the same word can mean ‘to be languid or spiritless’ or describe something muddled and unintelligible. These layers of meaning capture some of Laracy’s ambivalence about working with pāua shell, a material that brings to mind mass-produced souvenir ornaments that index an imagined indigeneity for the tourist consumer, but, for Laracy, also carries the memory of her grandfather. The pieces in Parure seek to negotiate these contradictory associations and Laracy’s material inheritance as a Pākehā maker.
A Time of Waiting
TE WAI NGUTU KĀKĀ
GALLERY
TĀMAKI MAKAURAU
AUCKLAND
—
28.03.2025–23.05.2025
In a famous interview, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman addresses the excruciating length of time for which she often holds single shots in her films. While a lot of cinema strives to erase time, she says, “With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death … I took two hours of someone’s life.”
A similar premise is explored in A Time of Waiting at Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery. Curated by artists Chris Braddock and John Vea with the gallery’s director, Stephen Cleland, the exhibition centres contemporary performance practices that consider the potential of time wasted or time felt to intervene in capitalist time measured. What, other than profit, can we use our bodies and time, our bodies-in-time, to produce? The show will comprise live performance as well as other media, including sound, sculpture and moving image, shown across and beyond the gallery spaces. Ngutu Kākā will also partner with Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū to present a series of temporary installations and satellite events in Ōtautahi.
Tui Emma Gillies, Echoes of the Island Seas
MASTERWORKS GALLERY
TĀMAKI MAKAURAU
AUCKLAND
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05.04.2025–10.05.2025
Recently returned from a residency in Taitung, Taiwan, Tui Emma Gillies will present a series of tapa works at Masterworks. These reflect on the time she spent swapping knowledge of tools and rituals used in Tongan ngatu with local practitioners working within their own sister traditions, all of them beating bark into cloth together. The works on view look back to this time of dialogue, connecting a shared cultural heritage with ecological practices that centre the protection of the earth’s natural systems and living beings. Sea-dwelling creatures, snakes and mountainscapes painted in earth pigment, ink and acrylics converge with kupesi motifs in Gillies’ tapa, her call on our collective responsibility to live lightly on the earth and safeguard our fellow inhabitants.
Interlaced: Animation and Textiles
GOVETT-BREWSTER ART
GALLERY
NGĀMOTU
NEW PLYMOUTH
—
07.12.2024–27.04.2025
In the editing room is perhaps where the work of the filmmaker feels most like that of the seamstress: sorting the snaking lengths of film, chopping them up, splicing them together again in search of the perfect cut. US-based artist Jennifer West points to this resonance with her quilts. Stitching tracts of film of differing widths and colours into elaborate, translucent compositions through which the light streams like stained glass windows, her works are a paean to the materiality of film that asks the viewer to imagine the image stiff between their fingers.
This invitation is one extended throughout Interlaced: Animation and Textiles, curated by Alla Gadassik, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre’s International Film Curator in Residence (2022–25). Taking the kinaesthetic works of Len Lye as a springboard, the exhibition brings together works by international and Aotearoa-based artists that explore the connection between moving-image and textile traditions, with particular focus on weaving practices of the Pacific from which Lye took so much inspiration.
Paul Maseyk, Jugs in New Zealand Painting
TE WHARE O REHUA
SARJEANT GALLERY
WHANGANUI
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01.03.2025–22.06.2025
After debuting at the Dowse last year, Paul Maseyk’s exhibition of jugs copied from New Zealand paintings, and some of the paintings they were copied from, is being re-presented at the Sarjeant Gallery this Autumn.
The show includes over sixty jugs made by the potter in homage to artists such as Bill Hammond, John Weeks, Joanna Margaret Paul, Frances Hodgkins, Milan Mrkusich and many more. Some are direct replicas and others interpretations, but Maseyk describes them all as ‘facsimiles’ of the painted jugs, perhaps even of real pieces that sat in these artists’ studios that made their way into the artworks. Arranged around the gallery, however, with their various heights and girths and slopes of form, the jugs seem more like object-portraits. There are the grand dames, the fathers-of, the icons and the iconoclasts—all the manifold characters that make up an art history, each with their stylistic contribution to the development of painting, and each, Maseyk shows, with their own unique taste in ceramic vessels.
The Brood
THE DOWSE ART
MUSEUM
TE AWAKAIRANGI KI TAI
LOWER HUTT
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15.02.2025–22.06.2025
The Brood gathers nine new commissions from artists positioned as the ‘rage babies’ of contemporary art in Aotearoa: Iann An, Grace Crothall, Harry Culy, Wesley John Fourie, Cassie Freeth, Brad Logan Heappey, Theo MacDonald, Nathan Taare and—honing in on its promised themes of the feral-familial and psychic inheritance—a collaborative work by mother–daughter duo Tia and Ming Ranginui.
What’s to fear from this rising generation? Demon dogs, the Pentecostal Church and haunted houses abound, renewing the horror tropes that have emerged to describe national contemporary art and cinema alike. But if the New Zealand Gothic and the Cinema of Unease both have their roots in settler anxiety and nineties cynicism, The Brood is acting against symbolic bad parents and the realities of generational inequality, and playing with the idea of the vengeful, stroppy ghost of future children. After all, when Boomers hold 60 percent of the country’s riches, what could be a scarier monster than a wealth tax?
John Ward Knox, Old Growth
ROBERT HEALD GALLERY
TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA
WELLINGTON
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03.04.2025–26.04.2025
John Ward Knox’s Old Growth follows the Ōtepoti Dunedin-based artist’s recent exhibition at Tokyo’s Goya Curtain, titled the godwit project. That exhibition comprised a series of sculptural tributes to the enigmatic bird. Knox gave them bodies sculpted of native timber and heads of an imported species, the woodgrains evoking plumage and the ripple of still, silvery saltmarshes. Details such as the bird’s needle beak, good for fishing fat-rich marine worms from the tidal mud, incorporated whale bone sourced from the far south of Te Wai Pounamu and woolly-mammoth ivory from melted permafrost on the Alaskan tundra. Each material gesture was thought out as an expression of the bird’s essence, while a collection of blue-ink etchings—delicate, almost as though feathers had just momentarily brushed up against the paper—had that essence once again take flight.
Knox will return to these meditations—permanence, ephemerality, time and age—in Old Growth with characteristic sculptural poetry, presenting a significant new work carved from tōtara and macrocarpa timbers, and a suite of dry-point etchings.
Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux, Radicant
HOCKEN LIBRARY
ŌTEPOTI DUNEDIN
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15.02.2025–26.04.2025
‘Radicant’ is an adjective used primarily by botanists to describe specimens producing roots from their stems. Radicant plants are commonly creepers. Periwinkle (Vinca) and ivy (Hedera) are both examples of this principle, tending to grow in thick mats along the ground, constantly putting out new roots to secure themselves in place. Etymologically speaking, something radicant is ‘bringing forth roots’.
Offering both poetic intimations and technical precision, Radicant became the title for Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux’s Frances Hodgkins Fellowship exhibition—the outcome of the artists’ year in residency in Ōtepoti Dunedin, during which they have worked with the university’s Department of Botany to reimage the anatomical plant models held in its collection since the late 1800s. They will present their experiments across large-scale sculpture, animation and sound, a sort of interdisciplinary radicanting that explores new ways of accessing and relating to the nonhuman through technology and collaboration.
Introducing the Artist Advice Bureau