Adam Art Gallery » Past Exhibitions

in camera

Adam Art Gallery — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:08:11 +0000

(A Film Called) Ellipsis, Anna Sanderson in residence 2011

4 June–10 July 2011
g. bridle
The Inimical: A Selection from the Retreat
g.bridle collects objects and images and then brings them together in new configurations using the gallery as a ‘sanctuary’ where different connections can be made. By such means the artist proposes a model of practice whereby the lines between making, collecting and arranging are blurred and questions are raised about how things acquire or are imbued with aura and thus granted meaning.

16 July - 21 August
Richard Frater, Chris Prosser, Anna Sanderson
(A Film Called) Ellipsis
In Continuous Project Altered Daily (October Books, 1993) American artist Robert Morris proposes how sculpture can accommodate time and the environment. Inspired by this collection of writing, three different practitioners took up residence in the gallery to produce an accumulative environment—akin to a film in the making—to reflect on the act of collecting as a process in time. Musician and composer Chris Prosser sampled material from his personal archive of musical scores; artist Richard Frater presented a compilation of New Zealand moving image on the natural environment; and writer Anna Sanderson responded to the ceramic collections held at Victoria University of Wellington.
Curated by Laura Preston.

27 August - 2 October
Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov
Private Moon
Utilising humour, satire and poetic tenderness, Moscow-based artists Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov provide poignant insights into the human condition, particularly the relationship between personal will and state control as experienced in Soviet Russia. This exhibition presented their most recent series of large-scale colour photographs. Each depicts an intimate and evolving relationship between a man and his Private Moon.
Exhibition organised by Marcus Williams, Unitec, Auckland.

8 October - 13 November
The Victorian Album, the Feminine and the Personal
During the Victorian era, photography became remarkably popular and accessible, stimulated in part by the technological innovation of the carte-devisite process. This exhibition examined the way in which New Zealand women utilised this new medium, presenting work that has rarely—and in many cases never—been displayed or reproduced, to provide a fascinating window into Pakeha and Maori women’s experience of modernity and the complex cultural interweavings of late colonial society.
Curated by Dr Sandy Callister, Resident Scholar, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington.

19 November - 18 December
Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye
Drawn primarily from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, this exhibition presented almost all the photogram portraits made by Len Lye in 1947, a body of work that until recently was neither well known nor fully understood. Here Lye’s works will be contextualised in relation to the tradition of the silhouette portrait and the camera-less photograph. This is the Adam Art Gallery’s biennial student-led project which enables students to research, write about and present an exhibition on a unique body of work.
Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen and his Art History Honours students.

Behind Closed Doors

Adam Art Gallery — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:17:52 +0000

Dane Mitchell, Untitled (Flag) from The Barricades 2007 and Daniel du Bern, Protection: Pure (2/5) 2005-6

From June to December 2011 the Adam Art Gallery presented, Behind Closed Doors: New Zealand Art from Private Collections in Wellington, a major exhibition that set out to canvass selective ‘moments’ in a history of New Zealand art from 1946 to the present, drawn exclusively from private collections in Wellington.

This revealing exhibition provided a rare opportunity to see works that complement and extend the holdings of New Zealand’s public and corporate collections. The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are simultaneously significant works by major figures and tributes to the often close relationships that accrue between artists and their patrons.

Many of the selected works are physically and psychologically ambitious, supporting the claim that it is possible to stage a ‘museum-quality’ show drawn exclusively from private sources. There are also works that are modest and delicate, testament to the intimate and personal relationships developed by living with art.

The exhibition includes paintings by renowned artists Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon, seldom-seen works by Michael Smither and Rita Angus, along with provocative multimedia art works by Peter Robinson and Ronnie van Hout.

Behind Closed Doors also became a portrait of Wellington city. Working like a sleuth, curator of the exhibition and Gallery Director, Christina Barton uncovered a surprising number of committed art lovers in the city, whose collecting endeavours discreetly nourish Wellington’s cultural life.

The exhibition is complemented by a book documenting a selection of the works as they appear at home, with photographs by leading New Zealand photographer Neil Pardington and texts by writer Lara Strongman. This is designed to offer an intimate alternative to the ‘institutional’ framing of works at the Adam Art Gallery.

A public programme of floor talks, panel discussions and film screenings provided a platform for critical discussion on the issues raised by the exhibition. For more details please check here

Behind Closed Doors: New Zealand Art from Private Collections in Wellington is supported by Creative New Zealand.

Points of Contact

Adam Art Gallery — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:50:58 +0000

Jim Allen Space Plane, Environment No. 1, 1969 (2010 reconstruction)

The exhibition Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica traced the historical and conceptual connections between New Zealand artist Jim Allen (b.1922), a significant figure in the development of post-object art in New Zealand, and two of his key contemporaries: expatriate experimental filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye (1901-1980) and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980).

Points of Contact drew together bodies of work which share certain material and conceptual qualities, most especially their engagement with light, movement, colour, and the body.

Central to the exhibition was the reconstruction of Allen’s pivotal 1969 Small Worlds exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland, one of the earliest instances of environmental sculpture to be presented in New Zealand.

These installations were joined by other works by all three artists that are variously originals, reconstructions and photographic documentation. The re-staging enabled viewers to dwell on the challenges and possibilities posed by the re-presentation of ephemeral or conceptual works of art, and therefore to explore the complex legacy of the ‘post-object’.

This exhibition presented Hélio Oiticica’s work for the first time in New Zealand.

Points of Contact joins a number of recent surveys that challenge the European and North American art historical paradigm, proposing and examining instead parallel and specific art historical trajectories outside these centres, in both their local and global dimensions.

News article on Jim Allen’s Contact at ARTSPACE, Auckland March 2011

Organised and toured by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with assistance from Creative New Zealand and Michael Lett and curated by Tyler Cann and Mercedes Vicente. Thanks to the New Zealand Film Archive and the Len Lye Foundation.

Art Forum 2011

Adam Art Gallery — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:46:02 +0000

1. Re-Modernism
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 23 February 2011

What promise does the modern hold for artists, architects, designers, social and cultural thinkers? Or is our contemporary fascination with modernism merely nostalgic—a doomed attempt to reconstitute something that has passed? What does modernism mean for the present? How can we even critically reflect upon such questions if we are still living within modernity? These and other questions were debated by a panel of speakers in the first of a new series of discussions designed to engage key topics galvanising thinkers and practitioners.

Speakers included: Artist Lisa Crowley, film theorist Minette Hillyer (Victoria University of Wellington), art historian Ann Stephen (University of Sydney), design historian Christopher Thompson. Chair artist Gavin Hipkins.

2. Re-Construction
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 18 May 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

What status does the reconstruction of an original art work have? If it is not an authentic artefact, then can it have value? Is it indeed an artwork? Why is there a need or desire to reconstruct, and what kind of relationship to the past does it enable? How does our contemporary impulse to make things over tally with a new need for resourcefulness in addressing questions of sustainability? These and other questions will be debated by a panel of speakers in the second of a new series of discussions designed to engage key topics that are galvanising thinkers and practitioners.

3. Rehearsal
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 17 August 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

Why are so many contemporary artists treating acts of rehearsal as the basis of their practice? Why has there been a re-examination of performance art histories recently? What is the relationship between the repeated act and an ultimate act? Could the interest in rehearsal be a reflection of online modes of communication, where the self is continually performed and identity perpetually edited?

Speakers include: Artist Alex Monteith, theatre theorist David O’Donnell (Victoria University of Wellington), curator Helena Reckitt (Goldsmiths, University of London). Chair artist David Cross (Massey University Wellington).

4. Re-Locate
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Tuesday 29 November 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

As the final forum in the series, this discussion brings the conversation closer to home. Reviewing the fervent interest in community driven endeavours and creative pursuits, this discussion will question if ‘the local’ did indeed ever leave us. What are current understandings of the local, and how does the re-instatement of this term respond to the politics of globalisation? Is the return to the local an opportunity for post-colonial theories to be re-called? What are the economic drivers and environmental factors that are influencing this ethos?

The Art Forum 2011 series is a collaboration between the Adam Art Gallery and the City Gallery Wellington.

The Commons Project

Adam Art Gallery — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:51:53 +0000

Richard Francis (Auckland)
and Jason Kahn (Zürich/Los Angeles)
Sunday 30 January 7pm
Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, Bats Theatre, 1 Kent Terrace

Campbell Kneale (Wellington)
and Alan Courtis (Buenos Aires)
Thursday 3 February 6pm
James Smith Carpark, 162 Wakefield Street

David Watson (Auckland/New York)
and the New Zealand School of Music
Sunday 20 February 12noon-1pm
Parade commencing from the Adam Art Gallery 12 noon, culminating in a performance at the Embassy Theatre,
10 Kent Terrace 1pm

Annea Lockwood (New York)
Wednesday 27 April 11am-5pm
Peter McLeavey Gallery, 147 Cuba Street

What and where are the commons today?
The commons is a space where resources are collectively owned or shared. Deriving from pre-industrial agrarian times, the commons was a demarcated site that could not be commodified. It was neither public nor private. The commons was managed by the local community which advocated for inclusivity and shared activity.

This project seeks to establish the commons again within the fabric of Wellington city. It calls on the community to gather in our urban environment and to claim space outside the market paradigm. It advocates for a common ground and collective experience.

To locate a space between public and private is to acknowledge that our environment is determined by power relations. The difference between what is private and what is public is marked by who is given access and for what ends. Finding somewhere between these definitions is to open up possibilities for action and to enable new meanings to take shape.

Right now we are living in a time of commercial contradiction: between hyper-capitalism and economic instability. There is also renewed investment in developing communities based on effective conservation and resource management. Here, in the space of negotiation—between community needs and capital enterprise, between the commercial agenda of the street and the city’s endorsed behaviour as a creative capital—a commons can be established. The proposition of this event is that this can be effected through sound.

Music is a popular medium. It creates shared states of being. It is undeniably pervasive. It cannot be ignored. People who make music do so together in the spirit of community and without regard for the structures of class. Music for this project is a tool, a means to explore an alternative to today’s rampant culture of consumption and propose other ways of communicating.

The Commons Project will not simply deliver music freely. It will challenge expectations of what music can be—delving into electronic sampling, score-based instrumentation and processional sounds—and where it should be performed. We have set a challenge for participants, by inviting them to work in city sites that are either unfamiliar or that test expectations of where one might hear sounds performed.

This series is based on collaboration. The collective dynamics explored by each performance will not only build relationships between sound and site but will also connect local practitioners with artists from other places with potentially long-term effects. The aim is to establish common ground not only in the public and private spaces where performances will be staged but in the connective threads that will stretch in many directions from this point.

Through the pervasive and popular medium of sound, this series of performances aims to empower an understanding of community and to re-imagine the commons as a public space to be re-claimed In Our Name.

Laura Preston – Curator

The Adam Art Gallery staged this series between January and April 2011. The Commons Project is the second off-site series to be staged as part of the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check programme focus, which sets out to explore the overlap between the visual and the aural.

We acknowledge the generous support of the New Zealand School of Music and Wellington City Council through its Cultural Grant Funding Programme towards the realisation of this project.

Designs for Living

Adam Art Gallery — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:29:50 +0000

Louise Menzies Letters to Students of the Radiant Life 2010

Long Live the Modern New Zealand’s New Architecture 1904-1984
Mladen Bizumic From Cube To Ball (Chapter 2)
Lisa Crowley National Projects
Louise Menzies Letters to Students of the Radiant Life

Designs for Living was a suite of four exhibitions that revisited twentieth-century modernism as it took shape in New Zealand. Drawing on visual and archival material and our built heritage, these projects sought to document certain features of this important artistic, architectural, social, technological and material legacy.

Designs for Living was developed around Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture 1904-1984, the exhibition curated by Julia Gatley and Bill McKay and toured by the Gus Fisher Gallery, The University of Auckland, brought attention to key buildings that have been identified as crucial to our modernist history. Organised under the aegis of DOCOMOMO, a world-wide organisation dedicated to documenting the achievements of the modern movement in architecture, the show drew attention to the particular contribution of New Zealand architecture to this project.

To complement this exhibition, the Adam Art Gallery invited three New Zealand artists to present chapters from their ongoing research into New Zealand’s modern history. Deploying different mediums and forms, and addressing strikingly different aspects of this legacy, artists Mladen Bizumic, Lisa Crowley and Louise Menzies offer richly various responses to modernism’s social and artistic ideals.

In realising these projects the Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the J. C Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington Special Collections, Creative New Zealand and Weleda New Zealand Ltd, Gus Fisher Gallery, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland and Coopers Creek.

Object Lessons

Adam Art Gallery — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:36:09 +0000

The Otolith Group, A Long Time Between Suns, Otolith II 2007

London-based art collective and 2010 Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group presented their work for the first time in New Zealand at the Adam Art Gallery. Their trilogy of film works and book project A Long Time Between Suns sympathetically re-orientates our perception of history by treating the past as an archival resource to re-envisage the future. Theirs is no utopian imagining, but a sceptical image of a ‘global’ future built from a disjuncture of sounds and images that tap into ideas of futurity and trans-national histories.

The Otolith Group was staged alongside Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction, an exhibition curated by Laura Preston and Mark Williams that also investigated the past in the interests of engaging the future. Five artists/collectives, who all operate between the spheres of music and the visual arts—Fitts & Holderness, DJ $1 Record aka Bryce Galloway, Caroline Johnston, Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, and Ronnie van Hout—were invited to produce new works that took as their starting point the idea of “the record”.

The record is a dissemination device and a visual object, a record of the event in time and a commodification of a moment in history—Bruce Russell

Object Lessons was conceived in the wake of the digital download. The project investigated the visual forms of music as a way to address issues of documentation and distribution. It was curious about how histories accrue around this object as a material artefact and as a commodity. Intriguingly the music record provides access to the past and yet it implies an inevitable distance from the contexts and circumstances of its production. Therefore the lesson of this object is that while the past may be ultimately unobtainable, stories, memories, values, and beliefs assemble around it.

The exhibition explicitly focused on independent music production as a site where the social, economic and political effects of recording are re-negotiated by artists eager to work outside “the system” and usually “off the record”. Here questions of commodification were critically addressed and social and cultural codes are inventively reworked.

The works presented by the artists forecast the future by reconnecting with the past, to resist by reorienting the “impending tsunami” of the digital download and the modalities of communication within which music now circulates.

Object Lessons was the second project to be curated for the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check research initiative that explores the intersections between music and the visual arts. It was accompanied by a public programme of talks, workshops and performances. This exhibition project was accompanied by an illustrated publication with an essay by theorist and musician Bruce Russell and a CD interview with Campbell Kneale and Antony Milton.

Exhibitions supported by LUX, London, VideoPro, ImageLab and Coopers Creek.

Play On

Adam Art Gallery — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:47:59 +0000

Slave Pianos’ (Michael Stevenson, Danius Kesminus, Rohan Drape, Neil Kelly) Slave Pianos (of the Art Cult) (1998-1999)

Julian Dashper
Michael Parekowhai
Ava Seymour
Slave Pianos
Terry Urbahn

Play On was the first in an occasional series of curated exhibitions designed to investigate the relationships between sound and art, generated from the Adam Art Gallery’s unfolding Sound Check research programme. For this exhibition curator Christina Barton brought together four major works produced in the 1990s by leading New Zealand contemporary artists, and staged these referentially-rich installations alongside a newly commissioned work.

Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory (1992-1993), Michael Parekowhai’s Ten Guitars (1999), Slave Pianos’ [Michael Stevenson, Danius Kesminus, Rohan Drape & Neil Kelly] Slave Pianos (of the Art Cult) (1998-1999), and Terry Urbahn’s The Karaokes (1995-1997), were joined by Ava Seymour’s 11 Bars of Oboe (2010). Each work uses an aspect of music as a metaphor for thinking about art and art history.

Considering the significant ways these installations reflect the social, cultural and critical turns of the 1990s and beyond, and drawing connections between them in terms of their use of music as both subject and form, Play On raised important questions about what art is and how culture works.

Supported by Creative New Zealand, Piano Shop Plimmerton and the VBC

Anthony McCall

Adam Art Gallery — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:35:48 +0000

Anthony McCall, Installation view of Breath (The Vertical Works) at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009 (Photograph: Giulio Buono). Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light.

The Adam Art Gallery brought McCall and his ‘solid light films’ to New Zealand for the first time. Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light, a major exhibition timed to coincide with the 2010 New Zealand International Arts Festival, was an opportunity to experience McCall’s ‘solid light ’ installations in the complex and labyrinthine spaces of the Adam Art Gallery, and offered insights into the full range of his output and working process showing a range of drawings, films and photographic works produced across the entire history of his practice.

A public programme of artist talks, film screenings, and discussion expanded on the exhibition to place the works of this British-born, New York-based artist in context. A highlight of this programme included the one-off opportunity to view Line Describing a Cone (1973), McCall’s first ‘solid light film’. This was presented at the Wellington Town Hall, in conjunction with the New Zealand Film Archive on Monday 15 March 2010.

Anthony McCall’s works feature in major international collections including Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.

Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Thomas Zander, Cologne and Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris.

This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Chartwell Trust; Keystone Trust; David and Libby Richwhite; The Clark Collection; Fulbright New Zealand; Spyglass; Interface; Metro Productions; John Herber Ltd; Auckland City Council Public Art Team; Atlantic Pacific American Express; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; the New Zealand Film Archive; LUX, London and the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Source Material

Adam Art Gallery — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:45:49 +0000

Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past was a suite of five discrete projects, each with their own approach to the re-visioning of historical material.

The Labours of Herakles, the touring exhibition of lithographs and etchings by Marian Maguire which casts the archetypal Greek hero as New Zealand colonist was replaced in December 2009 by a group show of recent acquisitions from Victoria University of Wellington’s Art Collection. Featuring work by Vivian Lynn, Hye Rim Lee, Gavin Hurley, Daniel Malone, Billy Apple and Mary-Louise Browne, this diverse group show provided a snapshot of the current collecting activities of the University.

Alongside this, the Adam Art Gallery was proud to host seven precious Attic vases, illustrating scenes from the life of Herakles and selected from various collections by Victoria University’s Senior Lecturer in Classics, Judy Deuling.

Downstairs an exhibition curated jointly by David Maskill, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University, and his honours-year postgraduate students looked closely at the artist prints published in the 19th-century French journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts from 1859 to 1933, held in the university’s library. This curatorial project was the first to address the journal’s key role in the survival, revival and dissemination of European printmaking.

The fourth exhibition presented Bible Studies (New Testament) a major new body of work by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins that brought literary and religious sources into play to produce a rich commentary on the lasting power of iconography as its shapes us personally and collectively.

Finally the Adam Art Gallery paid tribute to New Zealand artist Julian Dashper by presenting two recent acquisitions to the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection which also recall the past in unexpected ways.

The Adam Art Gallery published two catalogues to accompany the exhibitions. One has been prepared by David Maskill and his students to accompany their selection of prints from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The other documents Gavin Hipkins’ Bible Studies (New Testament) and features a new essay by leading Australian art historian Rex Butler and an interview with the artist conducted by contemporary art writer Allan Smith.

On 3 February 2010, the Adam Art Gallery held a forum to complement Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past. Academics from the fields of literature, religious studies, art history and classics shared their disciplinary approach on the re-use and re-interpretation of historical material to discuss what is at stake in the interpretation of texts and images from the past. Panellists included Judy Deuling, Anna Jackson, David Maskill, Glyn Parry. Chaired by Ian Wedde

In realising these projects the Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Photography by Woolf, Victoria University’s School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Exhibition Services, and Coopers Creek.