EVENING FLIX

The primitive allure of the movies is a thing of light and shadows.
—Jack Smith

The Adam Art Gallery with Salient and VBC 88.3fm present a film series to accompany the exhibition Beautiful Creatures: Jack Smith / Bill Henson / Jacqueline Fraser

All films will be screened in the Memorial Theatre, Student Union Building
Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington

$5 ticket includes refreshments in the Adam Art Gallery between 5 and 6pm

TABLEAU

Maria Montez’s…effect cannot be known by words, described in words, flaunts words (her image spoke).
—Jack Smith

Derek Jarman, Caravaggio (1986) 90mins, colour, sound, UK

Part biopic and part homage, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio turns to the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) for source material and as a font of aesthetic inspiration: incorporating details of the director’s own life into a script toying with themes of blasphemy, violence, homosexuality, languor, and the relationship between film and painting. Jarman’s identification with the most influential painter of the Italian Baroque extends into questions of form. The film deploys Caravaggio’s distinctive chiaroscuro (light and dark) as a principle of cinematic lighting, and experiments with reconstruction by animating the style, mood and composition of the artist’s most famous paintings into tableaux that hover expressively between stillness and motion.

Wednesday 8 May, 6 PM
Memorial Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington

MILIEU

It was like directing the wind.
—Ken Jacobs on Jack Smith

Mary Jordan, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006)94mins, black-and-white and colour, sound, USA

Mary Jordan’s portrait of Jack Smith is also the biography of a milieu: the underground film, art, and performance scene that animated downtown New York City in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Smith was a key figure in both art and cinema worlds. The auras and afterimages that crowd around his legend can be tracked through the work of several generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, John Waters, Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin. Jordan’s film explores Smith’s life and output beyond the legal storm that grew around Flaming Creatures (1962-63), attending to his largely unseen corpus of photographs, midnight performances improvised in his Lower East Side loft, film clips and other fragments of an interior landscape. The Atlantis of the title refers to The Siren of Atlantis: a vehicle for the B-movie muse Maria Montez, who Smith worshipped. Jack Smith died of AIDS-related causes in 1989. But Jordan’s interviews with luminaries ranging from John Zorn to John Waters attest to the persistence of his influence on film, performance, installation, photography, and a radical queer aesthetic. As the playwright Richard Foreman put it ‘everybody stole from Jack’.

Wednesday 22 May, 6 PM
Memorial Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington

INCANDESCENCE

Girl of the Year 1965
—New York Herald Tribune

Ronald Nameth, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966)12mins, black-and-white and colour, sound, USA

John Palmer, David Weisman, Ciao! Manhattan (1972)
92mins, black-and-white and colour, sound, USA
Staring Edie Sedgwick, Wesley Hayes, Isabel Jewell, Paul America, Viva!, Brigid Berlin, Baby Jane Holzer, Geoffrey Briggs, with Roger Vadim, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Margouleff

Edie Sedgwick features in Ronald Nameth’s memorable celluloid document of Andy Warhol’s expanded cinema event AW’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and as the subject of John Palmer and David Weisman’s Ciao! Manhattan. Both films provide fascinating insights into the 60s’ scene in which she starred, and capture in the language of film the metaphorical and literal means by which Warhol’s first superstar’s mind was blown.

Wednesday 5 June, 6 PM
Memorial Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington

SWANSONG

You don’t know what you really want.
—James Murphy

Will Lovelace, Dylan Southern, Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012) 110mins, colour, sound, USA

Following the final concert of LCD Sound System this documentary-cum-concert movie shifts between instigator and lead singer, James Murphy, and his angst-ridden decision to wind up the band at the very height of its success through the glorious event of his final performance. Poised between the sheer joy of the moment and the real conditions of growing older, we are shown with great pathos how much it means to commit to a certain kind of music when one is young and the challenge, or impossibility, of holding on to that magic.

Wednesday 26 June, 6 PM
Memorial Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington

The film series Evening Flix is presented in conjunction with the Adam Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Beautiful Creatures: Jack Smith / Bill Hensen / Jacqueline Fraser, on view until 7 July 2013.

For all inquiries contact Michelle Menzies
email: michelle.menzies@vuw.ac.nz
ph: +64 4 463 5229

Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
Kelburn Parade
PO Box 600
Wellington 6140
Aotearoa, New Zealand
ph +64 4 4635229
fax +64 4 4635024
adamartgallery@vuw.ac.nz
www.adamartgallery.org.nz

Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm
FREE ENTRY

Beautiful Creatures brings together three artists: doyen of New American cinema Jack Smith (1932-1989); leading contemporary Australian photographer Bill Henson (b. 1955); and Jacqueline Fraser (b. 1956), who has presented temporary installations and wall-based works in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the USA since the late 1970s. Each treats the youthful body as a form of aesthetic material, creating striking tableaux that connect with the viewer expressly through the effects of the visual. Updating and complicating the freighted history of the figure in art, these artists exploit the material and structural qualities of their media. They immerse the viewer in a seductive atmospheric, to both animate desire and hint at the larger forces within which visual pleasure operates.

A benchmark in the history of the New American cinema, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962-63) was the subject of controversy from the very beginning of its public life. Yet Smith intended Flaming Creatures to be a comedy. A jubilant celebration of carnal fantasy set as an intentionally startling version of Orientalist exotica, the film eschews conventional narrative to depict a pantheon of gorgeous and ambiguously gendered ‘creatures’—male, female, and transvestite—in a loosely connected series of joyously erotic tableaux.

Fifteen large colour photographs by Bill Henson from his Untitled 1998/1999/2000 series feature androgynous young men and women staged in murkily lit locations that hint at goings-on never made explicit. These laconic figures—louche outsiders and ingénue gamines—are the epitome of cool; caught with all the suggestiveness of artful cinematography. The mood they arouse cannot be pinned down or truly satisfied. Framed on the fringes of some dark, possibly wasted urban landscape they conjure a particularly contemporary discontent.

Jacqueline Fraser’s THE MAKING OF THE CIAO MANHATTAN TAPES 2013 is the latest manifestation of a 3-D practice which combines collages—copied and torn from magazines and embellished with fabric and other materials—with projected images, sound, sculptural elements, designer furniture and lighting, to produce an immersive environment. Hypersensitive to the lure of contemporary consumer culture, Fraser identifies points of conjunction between the visual repertoires of high art, design, and fashion and mainstream pop culture. She references the cult film Ciao! Manhattan (1972, directed by John Palmer and David Weisman) which loosely fictionalises the tumultuous life of Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s first superstar, whose upper-class dysfunction and legendary beauty turned her into the 60s’ art world’s first celebrity and one of its more incandescent casualties.

Curated by Christina Barton

Beautiful Creatures is accompanied by EVENING FLIX, a film series co-presented with Salient and VBC 88.3FM Wellington

February 2013 – April 2013
ORIENTATION WELCOME
28 February, Thursday, 3-4 PM

Adam Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington invite students to an Orientation event in the courtyard outside the Gallery, featuring live music and coffee by the talented baristas at Vic Books.
PANEL DISCUSSION 21st-Century Custodianship: Collecting Media Art
20 March, Wednesday, 6 PM

Join our panel for a discussion of the unique challenges to institutional art collections posed by the acquisition of media art, considered from the perspective of exhibition, collection and conservation practices.

Philip Dadson is a pioneer of time-based practice, and founded the Department of Intermedia and Time Based Arts at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1986. Videos from his Polar Projects series (2003-2005) are included in the exhibition 21st-Century Collecting.

Lissa Mitchell is Collection Manager of Photography and New Media at Te Papa Tongarewa. An artist who has worked with celluloid and direct film, she has held conservator positions relating to photography and video at the New Zealand Film Archive and the National Library of New Zealand.

Mark Williams is founding Director of CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand. He has held positions at the New Zealand Film Archive and LUX Artist’s Moving Image, London, and is co-curator of the video exhibition Moving on Asia: Towards a New Art Network 2004-2013, currently on view at City Gallery Wellington.
LUNCHTIME TOUR with Megan Dunn
10 April, Wednesday, 12 PM

Megan Dunn, art writer and Victoria University alumna will lead a lunchtime tour of art from the VUW Collection with Curator Michelle Menzies. Beginning in the Adam Art Gallery, this event will take the form of a walking tour of works hung in public locations through the Kelburn Campus. Their conversation will focus on the significance of placing art in spaces oriented to students, and the primal visual memories these works can evoke.
21st Century Collecting Public Programme

21^st-Century Collecting brings together some recent acquisitions to the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. Focusing in particular on new media, photography and conceptual art by a range of emerging and established artists, including Billy Apple, Mladen Bizumic, Philip Dadson, Sonya Lacey, John Lake, Jae Hoon Lee, Louise Menzies, Campbell Patterson, Ava Seymour, Sriwhana Spong, Elizabeth Thomson and Boyd Webb, the exhibition raises provocative questions about the nature of contemporary practice and the challenges facing those who are its custodians.

Collecting Media Art Panel Discussion: with Phil Dadson, Mark Williams and Lissa Mitchell
Collecting Media Art Panel_Discussion

We Will Work With You! Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998
Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems
The Consumers of the Future, a commissioned project by White Fungus

CURATORS’ TOUR

Wednesday 24 October 2012, 12 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Join Chris McBride, Phil Kelly, and other members of the Wellington Media Collective for a tour of the exhibition.

// In support of the one work exhibition of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75) the Adam Art Gallery, with the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, presents two practitioner-focused events exploring the history, politics, and contemporaneity of documentary practice:

MINI-SYMPOSIUM: The Challenge of The Bowery

Saturday 27 October, 12 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Geoffrey Batchen, Chair
Anne Noble
Wayne Barrar
Gavin Hipkins
Neil Pardington

Geoffrey Batchen has written of The Bowery as a ‘fundamental’ work: a ground-zero point of reference for documentary photography since the 1970s. This symposium aims to exfoliate the implications of this claim from the point of view of practice, by bringing together a range of artists working in self-conscious relation to the tradition. How do photographers negotiate the challenge to traditional documentary embodied in Rosler’s work (and reiterated in essays by herself, Allan Sekula, and others in this period)? And how does the answer to this question, in its permutations across generational lines, speak to the contemporary life of the form?

FILM PROGRAMME: The Essay Film and Conceptual Art

Saturday 24 November, 4.15 PM
New Zealand Film Archive Wellington
84 Taranaki Street

Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue”, dir. Martha Rosler, 1982. 25:45 min., colour, sound.
Super-8 Shorts, dir. Martha Rosler, 1974. 14:50 min., Super 8mm film on video, colour, silent:
  Backyard Economy I, 3:26 min.
  Backyard Economy II (Diane Germain Mowing), 6:32 min.
  Flower Fields, 3:40 min.

Te matakite o Aotearoa / The Māori Land March, dir. Geoff Steven, 1975, Seehear Films/TV2. 60 min., colour, sound. Photography: Leon Narbey, Camera Assistant: Gil Scrine, Sound: Philip Dadson, Editing: Geoff Steven, Philip Dadson, Gil Scrine.

Why did so many artists of the 1970s make argument-based films? What does the interplay of sound and image offer to the aesthetics of conceptual art? And where do we locate the global resonance of social issues as indigenous as The Bowery, and as historical as the Māori land march?

Alex Monteith and Christina Barton will lead a conversation after the screening.

LECTURE: Polly Cantlon, Design for Life

Wednesday 14 November, 6 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Polly Cantlon will provide a historical description of the Wellington Media Collective and its radical aspirations, contextualizing the group’s local and international significance in the terms of graphic design. Focusing on specific graphic works within the exhibition, she will assess the role of design in the creation of publics and as a form of participatory democratic practice.

Co-sponsored by the School of Design and the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington.

POSTER COMPETITION: The Consumers of the Future

Friday 25 January
“Our children are important … They are the consumers of the future.”
- John Key

Between 2004 and 2007 the Wellington City Council demolished the city’s historic upper Cuba Street precinct, home to many artists and creative people, to make way for a motorway extension. This alteration of the city’s public space took place amidst long debate, and at the very moment at which the Council was branding Wellington New Zealand’s ‘Creative Capital.’ “Being kicked out of our studio politicised us and we became interested in the movement against unchecked and rampant inner-city development” write the editors of White Fungus magazine. This poster competition asks participants to use a comment by current Prime Minister John Key as a point of departure. The winning poster, to be judged on the basis of concept and design, will be published in the next issue of White Fungus and on the Gallery’s website. A limited edition print-run of 500 posters will be distributed in a stack at the Adam Art Gallery.

Judges: White Fungus; Wellington Media Collective; John Lake, artist; Kate Daellenbach, School of Marketing and International Business, Victoria University of Wellington.

ADAM ART GALLERY SKYPE CONVERSATION SERIES: Talking Praxis with Martha Rosler

Saturday 26 January, 12 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Live from Brooklyn, New York, this is the inaugural event of the Adam Art Gallery Skype Conversation Series. Martha Rosler will address her seminal work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75), discussing politics then and now, documentary practice, and activism in the digital commons over coffee, croissants, and web cameras.

Geoffrey Batchen and Michelle Menzies will act as discussants.

LECTURE: Rochelle Simmons, Visual Poetries 

Wednesday 30 January, 6 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Dr. Rochelle Simmons (Department of English, University of Otago) will discuss Martha Rosler’s seminal photo-text work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-5) in the terms of visual poetry: as a work preoccupied with problems of incommensurability, and the ethical and poetic limits of representation.

Co-sponsored by Hue & Cry Journal.

FILM PROGRAMME: B-Movie Nite

Thursday 7 February, 8 PM
Adam Art Gallery

30 Arthur Street, dir. David Donaldson, 2007. 20 min.

Beep Beep and The Island Of Terror, dir. Dave Donaldson, 2012. 15 min. (World Premiere!!)

+ Local Music Video Sampler

30 Arthur Street was a Wellington musical institution. For more than 18 years the building was used as rehearsal space and studio, in which time 20 plus albums and nine feature film scores were partly or wholly recorded there. Directed by Plan 9 composer David Donaldson, this impressionistic doco chronicles some of the building’s musical history, plus its destruction to make way for a bypass. Amongst the musicians featured are Toby Laing from Fat Freddys Drop, drummer Anthony Donaldson, and ex-Mutton Bird David Long.

Evening screening with beer & sausages.

EXHIBITION CLOSING: BOOK LAUNCH

Saturday 9 February, 4 PM
Adam Art Gallery

Victoria University Press, Wellington Media Collective, and the Adam Art Gallery warmly invite you to the launch the book We Will Work With You: Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998, at the closing of the exhibition.

Musical performance by Thrashing Marlin, a Braille Collective duo.

For more info see the Victoria University Press website.

The Consumers of the Future, a commissioned project by White Fungus

23 October – 21 December/22 January – 10 February 2013

Wellington Media Collective (2012). Design: Philip Kelly, Illustrations: Dave Kent.

We Will Work With You! Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998

Curated by the Wellington Media Collective with the Adam Art Gallery

The Wellington Media Collective was established in 1978 as a confederation of graphic designers, printers, photographers, and associates. Underpinned by a belief in the power of media arts to intervene in social space, their activities over two decades have involved the production of posters, magazines, catalogues, and leaflets for community and political groups, ranging from trade unions to arts and activist organisations. This retrospective exhibition examined the politics of style implicit in the Collective’s substantial body of graphic work, and through this lens, surveyed a history of public culture in Wellington and New Zealand. The Collective’s graphic archives interweave a story of political activism with a cultural history of performance and art, both located against a changing economic environment, new networks of distribution and communication, and the technological shift from page to screen. Comprising original prints, posters, publications and ephemeral material, as well as oral histories provided by members of the Collective, the exhibition drew on an archival project undertaken in collaboration with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Department of Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. A major book project documenting the Collective’s history was launched at exhibition’s close. Coordinated and edited by Ian Wedde with Mark Derby and Jenny Rouse, and designed by Wellington Media Collective, the extensively illustrated monograph is co-published with Victoria University Press.

The Adam Art Gallery acknowledges the sad passing of Dave Kent (1946-2013) and extends its warmest sympathy to his family and friends. Dave was a key figure in the Wellington Media Collective, the graphic history of which the Adam was very pleased to present in the exhibition We Will Work With You! in 2012-13. The extraordinary warmth and generosity shown towards Dave from his many colleagues and collaborators will be remembered as fitting tribute to his qualities as an artist and as a person of great commitment and courage.

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems

1974-75, Series of 45 gelatin silver prints of text and images on 24 backing boards
Kirk Gallery

The Adam Art Gallery was proud to present a one work exhibition of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75). A seminal piece of photo-conceptual art and a reference point in traditions of socially-oriented creative practice, The Bowery offers a portrait of what was once New York City’s most archetypical skid-row. Pairing images of derelict storefronts and empty street corners with a descriptive poetics of drunkenness and vagrancy, Rosler’s photo-text installation refuses the direct representation of an implied human subject in favour of a layered interrogation of the adequacy of both visual and literary modes to the experience of social marginalisation. Nonetheless, the work insists upon the political resonance of the material settings of urban blight. Images and text are interspersed with occasional blank panels in the space of a photographic image, and it is this dialectic between concreteness and the incommensurable which lends The Bowery its enduring critical charge. Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance, and as an essayist and social commentator. Her preoccupations centre on everyday life and the politics of the public sphere, often with an attention to women’s experience. The Adam Art Gallery hosted a series of public events to support this exhibition, including two fora on documentary practice co-sponsored by the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Martha Rosler participated in the inaugural Adam Art Gallery Skype Conversation series in early 2013, discussing politics, activism, and the digital commons in the context of her recent projects.

The Consumers of the Future, a commissioned project by White Fungus

Window Gallery

Ron and Mark Hanson, the editors of Wellington and Taipei based White Fungus magazine, were invited to prepare a series of posters to accompany the Wellington Media Collective and Martha Rosler exhibitions. Unfolding over the eight week duration of the exhibition in the Adam’s Window space, this poster sequence and its associated free newsprint publication took this remark by current Prime Minister John Key as a point of departure: “Our children are important… They are the consumers of the future.” Reflecting upon the concrete impact of neo-liberal thinking on Wellington’s urban and architectural fabric over recent decades, the White Fungus brothers talk back at local brandings of the city as New Zealand’s ‘Creative Capital.’ An emphasis on print publication ties the magazine’s zine aesthetic to a legacy informed by the Wellington Media Collective, and the project proposed the protest poster as at once a mode of still-contemporary activism and the formal expression of a local style. The Adam Art Gallery ran a Poster Competition to accompany the White Fungus commission, judged by Wellington Media Collective, White Fungus, artist John Lake, and Kate Daellenbach, School of Marketing and International Business, Victoria University of Wellington.

Wellington Media Collective, Martha Rosler, White Fungus Public Programme

Arts with Mark Amery RNZ
Mark Amery reviews the exhibition on RNZ

Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-valise Series D, Paris 1961. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, 1983-0032-250/A-Q to Q-Q. Reproduced courtesy of Viscopy.

Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011
27 July – 7 October 2012

Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011 was a major exhibition organised by the Adam Art Gallery. Drawing on the PhD research of Marcus Moore, guest curator of the exhibition, it explored the influence of Marcel Duchamp on New Zealand art, canvassing the history of Duchamp’s reception in New Zealand from 1960 to the present. It showcased seldom-seen works by Duchamp held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to document the little-known gift of his works as part of the Isaacs Bequest (1982), as well as referenced the ground-breaking exhibition of the Sisler Collection of Duchamp’s works that toured New Zealand in 1967.

These actual instances of Duchamp ‘in’ New Zealand were set alongside three generations of New Zealand artists who register a debt to his example. The show brought together works by 29 artists: Jim Allen, Billy Apple, Bruce Barber, g. bridle, L. Budd, Bill Culbert, Paul Cullen, Julian Dashper, Andrew Drummond, et al, Merit Gröting, Adrian Hall, Terrence Handscomb, Christine Hellyar, Giovanni Intra, Betty Isaacs, Julius Isaacs, Darcy Lange, Maddie Leach, Len Lye, Kieran Lyons, Daniel Malone, Julia Morison, Michael Parekowhai, Roger Peters, Malcolm Ross, Marie Shannon, Michael Stevenson, and Boyd Webb. It also presented ephemeral and archival material relevant to the subject. The exhibition was accompanied by a public programme that drew out a range of themes inherent in the topic, and a checklist with notes on each artist and introduction by Marcus Moore.

Marcus Moore’s approach, which was evident in the selection and layout of the exhibition, was to explore how Duchamp’s legacy can be read from a New Zealand perspective. Playing on the fact of our peripheral location, the show considered how key works by Duchamp have been examined, referenced, quoted and adapted according to the changing concerns of artists, from their initial reception of Duchamp in the 1960s through to the present. While Duchamp’s notion of the ‘readymade’ played a crucial role in the exhibition, other key works: the Large Glass and the Bôite en Valise in particular, were explored for the ways in which they inform local practice.

The exhibition received funding from the Massey University Research Fund.

Media release Peripheral Relations exhibition

Peripheral Relations Public Programme

Marcus Moore on Arts on Sunday, RNZ 29 July 2012
Marcus Moore on Radio NZ, Arts on Sunday 29 July 2012

Tina Barton on Upbeat RNZ 27 July 2012Tina Barton on RNZ, Upbeat 27 July 2012

Thomas Ruff, STE 1.19 (02h 48m / -35º), 1992, chromogenic colour photograph in wooden frame 2600 x 1800 mm. Courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland.

Dark Sky 1 May – 8 July 2012

This exhibition was timed to coincide with the 2012 Transit of Venus curated by Geoffrey Batchen with Christina Barton

The DARK SKY exhibition explored how photography has been deployed to capture the skies. Delving into the intersections between science, art and commerce, the exhibition brought together a range of images and artworks from 1874 to the present. These ranged from pocket-sized Real-Photo Postcards, to digital prints sent from space, to large-scale contemporary images and multipart installations, made by artists, astronomers, professional photographers, and unmanned spacecraft.
Timed to coincide with the second and last Transit of Venus that took place this century (6 June 2012), the exhibition provided an occasion to think through our fascination for the celestial realm and examine its technological and visual consequences.
DARK SKY was conceived by Geoffrey Batchen, leading photographic historian and theorist and Professor of Art History, and curated with Christina Barton, contemporary art historian and Director of the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington. Pooling their skills and knowledge they produced a striking line-up of historical and contemporary items, ranging from photographs by Hermann Krone—a professional photographer on the German expedition to the Auckland Islands, who documented the Transit of Venus in 1874—to contemporary German artist, Wolfgang Tillmans, who presented a body of work based, in part, on his life-long passion for astronomy and which includes a series of photographs he took of the Transit in 2004.
The exhibition also included substantial groupings of images by David Stephenson (Australia), Trevor Paglen (USA) and Eric Lee-Johnson (New Zealand) and single works by Colin McCahon (NZ), Ann Shelton (NZ) and Thomas Ruff (Germany). Two New Zealand artists were commissioned to create new works for the exhibition. Stella Brennan used research she had undertaken into the Soviet Union’s Venera space programme of the 1980s to develop a sound installation and Simon Ingram built an inflatable antenna that translated electromagnetic waves into instructions that drove a machine that produced a new ‘radio painting’.
DARK SKY was complemented by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Geoffrey Batchen and a public programme that brought scientists, artists, historians and writers together to respond to the occasion. A highlight was the panel discussion with German and New Zealand poets who were invited to observe and respond to the Transit of Venus by the International Institute of Modern Letters and Goethe-Institut. See here

DARK SKY received major support from the Australian High Commission; Goethe-Institut; IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen); the MacDiarmid Institute and the Art History Research Cluster at Victoria University of Wellington. The Adam Art Gallery also acknowledges the support of the Faculty of Science, Victoria University of Wellington; the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industry at University of Auckland, and the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Public Programme DARK SKY May-July 2012

Marco_Fusinato_and_Bruce_Russell Space Weather

Marco Fusinato and Bruce Russell Space Weather

Star time with Luke Smythe and Denis Sullivan

Star time with Luke Smythe and Denis Sullivan

Dr Pauline Harrris on Matariki

Dr Pauline Harrris on Matariki

Geoffrey Batchen in discussion with William Tobin 6 June 2012

Geoffrey Batchen in discussion with William Tobin 6 June 2012

William Tobin interviewed by Kim Hill 2 June 2012 RNZ

William Tobin interviewed by Kim Hill 2 June 2012 RNZ

Arts with Courtenay Johnston 30 May 2012 RNZ

Arts with Courtenay Johnston 30 May 2012 RNZ

Tina Barton in discussion with Jennie McCormack and Terry Galuszka 30 May 2012

Tina Barton in discussion with Jennie McCormack and Terry Galuszka 30 May 2012

Tina Barton in discussion with Chris Marshall and Michael Hannah 16 May 2012[mp3]

Tina Barton in discussion with Chris Marshall and Michael Hannah 16 May 2012[mp3]

Simon Ingram interviewed by Eva Radich 3 May 2012 RNZ [mp3]

Simon Ingram interviewed by Eva Radich 3 May 2012 RNZ [mp3]

Geoffrey Batchen and Tina Barton in discussion with Veronica Meduna

Geoffrey Batchen and Tina Barton in discussion with Veronica Meduna