Gallery Year: 2024 Exhibition Artists

Chris Booth, Homage to a Broken Stone, 2023–4

Stone, wood, stainless-steel cable, and fungi. Thanks to Allpress Olive Groves.

Chris Booth discovered the stone that features in his work in Tākou, Northland. Over centuries, it had been shaped by acid wash from the rotting foliage of prehistoric forests. Struck by its unique shape and proportions, which reminded him of a shrouded human body, Booth arranged with the kaitiaki to remove it. But, when it was dumped in his yard along with tonnes of heavy boulders, it broke in two. Years later, Booth and fellow Northland sculptor Tom Hei Hei tended to it like a damaged limb, using steel pins and bandages to make it whole again. Booth placed it atop a pyre structure made of Waiheke olive wood. A pyre would usually go up in flames, but here it is passed on to the world’s tiniest organisms. Slowly, billions of microscopic mycorrhizal fungi will consume the olive wood supporting the stone, lowering it back to earth. Booth contrasts this constant activity with the eternity represented by the rock, in a tribute to cycles of life and death in which everything has its place.

Steve Carr, In Bloom (Waiheke), 2024

Bronze. Courtesy Station, Melbourne and Sydney, and Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland.

At first glance, In Bloom may look like a casual arrangement of car tyres. However, its petrolhead nonchalance is an illusion. The tyres are actually cast in bronze, and proudly feature logos of the artist’s name. Craft masquerades as readymade! Carr has gone to great trouble, while appearing to have gone to none at all. To date, he has shown In Bloom at Auckland’s Britomart, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and Michael Lett, here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney. He usually treats the tyres as a vase, working with gardeners and botanists to create bespoke plantings within them. But, here, In Bloom is shown for the first time in ‘nature’, less framing it than being framed by it. 

Eddie Clemens, Cognitive Reorientation, 2023

1986 Mitsubishi Debonair V3000 Regal car, metal, pumps, hoses, generator, and barge.

Nordic-noir crime shows have become a television mainstay. The long Scandinavian winters offer the right atmosphere of darkness, seclusion, and stoicism for murder and intrigue. Forbrydelsen (aka The Killing) gained international success when released in 2007 and captured Eddie Clemens’s attention. Originally created for Scape 2022 in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, his Cognitive Reorientation is a response to a climactic scene in Forbrydelsen, when a car is lifted by crane from a waterway, revealing the body of a missing woman. In the television show, the car’s excavation is a turning point, whereas Clemens stalls and suspends the spectacle. Water endlessly pours from the boot, bonnet, and doors of his 1986 Mitsubishi Debonair V3000 Royal, mounted high on a platform, with algae hanging from its door handles and hub caps. The car becomes a miraculous, dystopian water feature.

Nicholas Galanin, An Unmarked Grave Deep Enough to Bury Colony and Empire, 2024

Excavation.

Nicholas Galanin has cut a hole in the ground on Waiheke in the shape of the iconic Queen Victoria statue in Albert Park, in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, suggesting an excavation or burial. Even as a ghostly absence, Victoria’s shadow looms over the land. Shovels stand by as an invitation to action and a reminder of the collective participation required to bury imperial power structures. An Unmarked Grave Deep Enough to Bury Colony and Empire is a companion to Shadow on the Land, a similar work Galanin made for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, based on the Captain Cook statue in Hyde Park. Both can be read as graves for colonial figures and reminders of the death they brought to Indigenous people through violence, disease, and dispossession. Galanin says: ‘This is an unmarked grave; the ideas, beliefs, tools, and artifacts buried here are not worthy of commemoration or reverence. They must not be revisited with longing or fondness, and the violence of empire and colony must be buried with complete commitment and finality.’ 

Brett Graham, Wakefield Dreaming, 2023

Wood, scaffolding, synthetic polymer paint. Courtesy Gow Langsford Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Thanks to Biggs Construction, Firth, Placemakers, and Nigel & Bev Marshall.

Before becoming the architect of New Zealand colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) was incarcerated in London’s Newgate Prison. He served three years for abducting and marrying a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, hoping to blackmail her rich father into supporting his political career. It was in prison that he devised his theory to increase the profitability of colonies by restricting land ownership. By delaying the sale of land to settlers, they would remain a landless workforce to be exploited, growing the wealth of the Motherland. Wakefield’s political writings redeemed him, and, in 1840, he was appointed Director of the New Zealand Company, where he put his theory into effect. But his plan, which overlooked the place of Māori people, would have real consequences for them. Brett Graham’s sculpture Wakefield Dreaming evokes and challenges Wakefield’s legacy. It is based on prison watchtowers—specifically the iconic ones at Paremoremo Prison, with its typically high percentage of Māori inmates. But there’s a twist. Graham says. ‘I’m conscious that, in the context of Waiheke, it is turning the tables; the wealthy and privileged being the ones being observed.’ While Wakefield is remembered as an innovative figure in New Zealand history, Graham’s sculpture entangles his ‘dreams’ with incarceration.

Turumeke Harrington, Stumped I-XII, 2024

Powder-coated steel. Courtesy Page Galleries, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington. Thanks to INEX Metals Ltd and Precision Laser Cutting.

The Auckland isthmus was once home to large swathes of kauri and conifer–broadleaf forests. Between 1870 and 1900, they were intensively cleared, making kauri timber and gum the region’s top exports and forestry its largest employer. Accounts from the time recall the smell of gum and new-sawn timber hanging in the air. Consisting of laser-cut cartoon-like ghosts of tree stumps scattered across the hillside, Stumped recalls this history. Turumeke Harrington’s installation is a portrait of a landscape tamed, harvested for profit and to make way for the urban life we live today. While visitors enjoy their stroll on the headland, Harrington reminds them that ‘nature’ once looked very different. 

Natalie Guy, The Staircase, 2024

Powder-coated steel and macrocarpa posts.

Italian architect Carlo Scarpa first gained prominence for renovating crumbling Venetian buildings by integrating modern materials and details—a trim of glass tiles here, a floating staircase or brass handrail there. Users felt they were moving through time as well as space. In 2022, visiting Scarpa’s projects in Venice, Natalie Guy’s attention was snagged by his staircases. She began scouring books and the internet for images, finding a design for a slender brass railing that turned a sharp 360 degrees around the corner of a stone staircase. The design, it turned out, was not by Scarpa at all, but by Act Romegialli—a contemporary design studio founded in 1996. Guy was drawn to her moment of misrecognition as a sign of modernism’s enduring influence on architectural design. The Staircase paraphrases Act Romegialli’s handrail design as a sculptural object, invoking Scarpa’s spectre on Waiheke, where many modernist-style residencies can be found, perhaps bearing his influence without knowing it. Her staircase leads nowhere, just for show.

Chevron Hassett, Te Kupenga, 2024

Totara, treated pine, paua, and acrylic.

Auckland’s central suburbs have witnessed intensive gentrification with many Māori families who once lived there having been pushed out by increased demand for these ‘character homes’.  Chevron Hassett links this with earlier waves of colonial settlement that displaced Māori from their land to build the urban landscape.

His work Te Kupenga is a hybrid, representing both a waharoa (gate) that would typically stand at the entrance of a pā (village), and an ornamental verandah, typical of colonial villas. It features whakairo (carving) patterns that speak to te ao Māori narratives of genealogy and knowledge transmission while mimicking Victorian lace or lattice work. It also conflates ideas of space and shelter. The verandah marks a threshold between the public space of the street and the private one of the home, while the waharoa invites passage onto the marae. 

Hassett describes the work as an interface between te ao Māori and te ao Pākeha. Standing over the walkway, framing the gulf, it can also be understood as an interface between past and future. With expanding settlement on Waiheke, the Matiatia headland is under threat of subdivision. Te Kupenga asks us to consider how we share, occupy, and value this space, and how we might ensure it remains for future generations to enjoy.

Gavin Hipkins, Hotel Flag, 2024

Billboard. Courtesy Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Reflecting on Waiheke’s relationship to moana and maritime practices, Gavin Hipkins calls on an International Code Signal Flag. He chooses the flag for the initial letter of his surname, the ‘H’ or ‘Hotel’ flag. Grounding his oversized flag on Waiheke, he alludes to the island’s history as a popular leisure destination for day-trippers and overnighters. For boaties, however, the H flag carries another message: ‘There is a pilot with local knowledge on board, to guide vessels into or out of port safely.’ By situating his coded message on Waiheke, Hipkins questions a culture of quick visits and consumer society. The billboard format is a shallow, temporary structure, but Hotel Flag reminds us of deeper knowledges of place and the need for local guidance.

After Ralph Hotere, Taranaki Gate Stations, 1981/2024

Metal fence units, sheep, and paint. Courtesy Hotere Foundation Trust. Thanks to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anton Forde, and Jennie Fenwick.

It’s been called ‘one of the strangest pieces of religious art imagined in this country’. For the Easter 1981 show Stations of the Cross: An Exhibition Based on the Passion of Christ at Ngāmotu/New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ralph Hotere made a modest proposal.

For his work Taranaki Gate Stations, Hotere asked the Gallery to construct a crucifix-shaped pen using fourteen standard pipe-and-mesh farm-fence units, to place fourteen sheep in it, to feed and water them for forty days, then send them to slaughter, either on Good Friday or at the end of the show. The gates were to be marked with Roman numerals (I–XIV) and the sheep painted with Arabic ones (1–14), both in a spectrum of fourteen colours.

The gallery didn’t realise the proposal, but included Hotere’s two collage drawings outlining it in the show and acquired them for its collection. In its audacity, Hotere’s idea stood in stark contrast to the other works in the show, which were more conventional paintings and sculptures, more standard depictions of the subject.

Hotere’s proposal still seems surprising and cheeky, and out of step with his place in the art-history books, the art market, and the popular imagination. It belongs less to the New Zealand painting mainstream, with which he is identified, more to post-object art. It’s the kind of work that might have been made by a Jim Allen or a Bruce Barber, for Auckland City Art Gallery’s Project Programme, a Mildura Sculpture Triennial, or an ANZART. It looks forward ten years to Hotere’s collaborative installations with Bill Culbert (begun in 1991) and his No. 8 installations (1992), made with New Zealand’s favourite fencing wire—neither of which seem anywhere near as edgy.

How should we read the work?

Hotere was Catholic, but the idea seems less religious and redemptive, more realistic and pessimistic.

Is it a nod to Parihaka in Taranaki, whose passive resisters erected their fences as fast as the colonial

government pulled them down? In 1881, one hundred years earlier, the village was invaded, and many of its people were rounded up and imprisoned.

Is it a riff on the work of Hotere’s friend Colin McCahon, who engaged with the Stations of the Cross theme extensively in the 1960s and 1970s? (Hotere owned McCahon’s 1974 Stations canvas Walk with Me 1.) Does Hotere take McCahon’s ‘gate’ metaphor literally?

Perhaps Taranaki Gate Stations was an expression of Hotere’s own desire not to be fenced in, typecast artistically.

Interestingly, in a subsequent third collage drawing for a ‘second version’ of the idea, Hotere stirs in topical references to the Springbok Tour. The Stations show ran from 11 March to 20 April 1981; the Springbok Tour occurred in July, August, and September. As it is dated simply 1981, we can’t know if this third collage drawing was produced in anticipation of the Tour or in full knowledge of the divisive protests it prompted. It makes no reference to the protests as such.

This third drawing incorporates a photo, attributed to the Otago Daily Times, showing rugby players playing in a field alongside a similar number of sheep, with Hotere’s crucifix pen sketched in around them. An annotation proposes a ‘happening’, requiring the sheep to be decanted and the pen used for a seven-a-side game between the All Blacks and Springboks—a cage fight:

ALL BLACKS

V

SPRINGBOKS

14 players

(a seven a side happening)

players enclosed in 14

steel meshed gates

—OR BARBED WIRE

no spectators—a safety precaution

(sheep, if well behaved,

might be allowed to view

the game)

Nothing quite computes. Is Hotere making an analogy between the gentle folk at Parikaha (building their righteous fences) and black South Africans forcibly cooped up in their bantustans (behind bad ones)? If so, why would he have All Blacks and Springboks compete together within this pen?

Perhaps Hotere wilfully mixes his metaphor, offering a puzzle without a solution, just to make us think. Even the reference to ‘Taranaki gates’ is wobbly. The term refers to cheap, crude, DIY-style wire-and-post gates, not the more expensive mesh-and pipe fence/gate units stipulated in the first two collage drawings. However, the third drawing says a wire-and-post version could be an alternative, and even includes a marginal illustration of a unit—with barbed wire.

Did Hotere intend for the work to be made or was the proposal just a provocation, a joke? It certainly reads like a conceptual-art ‘instruction’ piece that the gallery could realise on the artist’s behalf. The specifications are practical and precise, with materials and measurements.

But, even if the instructions are clear, they are incomplete. They don’t say if the work is to be installed inside the Gallery (it wouldn’t fit) or outside (possible, but where?).

With the kind permission of the Hotere Foundation Trust, we’re finally realising Taranaki Gate Stations—or our idea of it—forty-three years later, after apartheid ended in 1994 and after the Parihaka apology of 2017. We’re presenting it out of curiosity, to add a historical dimension to the show and to surprise audiences. While we have followed Hotere’s instructions to the letter, we are aware that we are realising his work in a different place and time, and in different company. It can only ever be after Hotere, our imagining what he imagined.

—Robert Leonard