Art in Unexpected Places

One of my favourite shots of Michael Parakowhai's Bull - looking ready to charge the portaloos.

He makes a good billboard too, outside the still-closed Christchurch Art Gallery.

I walked around inner city Christchurch last weekend and found myself photographing some of the many art works that have sprung up since the 2010 earthquake They are many and diverse, and I've photographed a lot of them many times, at different times of day (and night), in different weather. I like that we can do this now - that we have this sudden intimacy with contemporary artworks away from the more formal confines of an art gallery. It brings them to life in new ways I think.

I haven't names all the works I've shown here - mostly because I've either forgotten who the artist is, or, more likely, it's Sunday and I can't be bothered digging around in my files to find out. But I have gathered these images for visual pleasure - and to remind people everywhere that not everything about earthquake-stricken Christchurch is grey and glum and broken.

This is a fabulous display of photographs and texts related to the Christchurch earthquakes - interviews with those who have lived through the worst of it. It stretches along Worcester Boulevard and if you're in Christchurch, it's definitely worth a long look.

I like that the ability to decorate our battered city isn't restricted to the art elite. There's a ton of street art showing up, illuminating dark corners, and this series of works outside the broken (and closed) Christchurch Arts Centre - by school kids I'd say.

Dick Frizzell's marvellous work, set off beautifully by towering cranes and the skeletal beginnings of a new rebuild.

And a wider view, showing my favourite yellow work on the rear of Christchurch Art Gallery - artist's name forgotten and I'm too lazy to get out of my chair to find the appropriate issue of the gallery mag. part of the gallery's Outer Spaces series anyway.

""Fly me up to where you are" by Tiffany Singh, suspended outside the Christchurch City Council - and nicely reflected in the glazed facade.

Another work - I think - from Christchurch Art Gallery's Outer Spaces series called 'Faces from the Collection." Artist unknown.

"Faux Arcadia" by Michaela Cox, high on an exposed concrete block wall at the intersection of High and Hereford Streets.

Street art, Restart Mall

Street art, Restart Mall

The painted aerial pedestrian walkway over Colombo Street - or part of.

Another from "Faces in the Collection" - this one by Michael Smither.
I like the way it sits beside advertisements for hayfever and allergy medications on the outside of a Cashel Mall pharmacy.

And perhaps my favourite shot of all - One of Neil Dawson's sculptures, sitting on a cordoned off patch of grass like a strange space ship clone. It used to hang over Cashel Mall before the earthquakes. Now it sits here under the trees, behind the cordoned off Otautahi building, waiting for a new beginning.
We all do a lot of waiting around here.
So it's nice to have interesting things to look at.
We could be waiting a lot longer yet.
For repairs.
For a new city.

Art in the Bush

Kinetic work by NZ sculptor Phil Price

It’s a time for art – as opposed to earthquakes. For the last two years, I’ve been so focussed on documenting the changing face of post-earthquake Christchurch, that my usual posts on my other passions – art, architecture, design and general ‘visual paraphernalia’ – have slipped by the wayside. But it’s not for a lack of thinking about them; and ever since I was introduced to the McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula in May, I’ve been planning to share some of the highlights.

When a friend suggested the visit, I was apprehensive. I hadn’t heard of the park – despite it being billed as “Australia’s leading sculpture park” – and I imagined giant tin koala bears, stone kangaroos and wooden wombats cavorting across the landscape. I needn’t have worried. The place is astonishing and quite the best sculpture park I’ve seen in a long time.

"Torus - Hidden & Revealed"Adrian Page, Australia 1945-2010.

Set in 16 hectares of bush and landscaped gardens in Langwarrin, 4kms east of Frankston on the Mornington Peninsula, it attracts thousands of visitors each year. While the modern gallery presents an inspiring and engaging range of changing exhibitions and public programs, the outdoor sculpture collection showcases over 70 works by prominent Australian sculptors such as Inge King, Lenton Parr, Clement Meadmore, Anthony Pryor and Norma Redpath along with, recent acquisitions including Rick Amor, Peter Corlett, Robert Owen, Lisa Roet and Ken Unsworth – and I was thrilled to discover, three works by Christchurch sculpture, Phil Price, including the top work shown above, which Rupert Murdoch and his family commissioned for their mother, Lady Elisabeth Murdoch’s 100th birthday in 2009. (She is now 103).

"Twisters 2006" Phil Price, New Zealand B.1965

Kinetic Sculpture, Phil Price, New Zealand.

"Red Memory Smile (detail), Chen Wenling, China B. 1969

"Annulus 2007" Ken Unsworth Asutralia. B.1931.

"White  Ape 2005" Lisa Roet, Australia. B.1967

"Anno Domino 2009" Geoffrey Ricardo, Australia. B.1964.

""Spillwater 1966-67" Matthew Cox & Darren Davison, Australia

(One of my favourites - so quintessentially Australian)

Not actually an artwork at all - just a buoy in the lake. But it was my favourite shot of the day.

I forgot to get the name of this work - I was so duistracted by its reflection in the lake, not to mention that buoy.

Another of my favourite pieces that I forgot to name.

"Libra 1977" Lenton Parr, Australia, 1924-2003.

"Snuffle 2002-03" Sebastian Di Mauro, Australia.  B.1955

"Red,Yellow,Black 2002-03" Peter D Cole, Australia. B.1947

"Untitled 1/76, 1976" Reg Parker, Australia. B.1925.

Another of my favourite pieces.

Finishing where I began..... the unnamed man in the trees.

And, because I'm never far from either art or earthquakes these days, here's a very happy combination - Michael Parakowhai's Bulls, currently on show in Christchurch on a now-vacant city lot.

The Bulls of course are part of another whole story about the flourishing of art in Christchurch's earthquake-torn public spaces. In the absence of galleries, art has taken to the streets...... but more on that another time.

SOFA in Soft Focus

This has been a week of photographic posts - as opposed to anything wordy and more interesting. I blame the sore leg. I can't walk for long periods and I can't sit for long periods; hence I have resorted to the 'quick-fix' approach to blogging. Nonetheless, I hope some of you will find my photos a little pleasing. This one was taken at Christchurch Arts Centre - SOFA Art Gallery - last weekend and continues my preoccupation with architectural forms and art gallery signs.

An Art Post(er)

I like multiples of things. Can't seem to help myself. If one image can turn into six variations on a theme I'm all the happier for it. In this case the multiple overlay of art exhibition posters spotted around the streets of Christchurch.

Art Signs

Love the way someone has removed the 'M' from Smart and placed an apostrophe to make it Jonathan's Art Gallery rather than the original Jonathan Smart Gallery. (Maybe it was Jonathan himself?)

Signs of Art

Christchurch. September 2009. Ajr

I'm not sure what it is about the word ART but I find myself driven to photographing it - often, over and over! Maybe it's about the multiple resonances the word has for me personally; maybe it's about the fact that this one tiny, three-letter word packs such a powerful punch - for so many people in so many ways. I'm not going to analyse my attraction to the word beyond that. I'm just going to bring you my latest ART sign - this one imbued with so much more by virtue of the accompanying words. I ground to a halt underneath it - at Riccarton Rotary Market. Suffice to say, I wasn't driven to photographing the goods for sale underneath the sign.

The Art of Buildings

Christchurch. September 2009. Ajr

We're a little sparse on detail here given that I photographed this work from at least six feet away, but I hope it gives a tiny hint of the beauty of Sukjoon Jang's binary-like photographic slithers of the stone buildings within the Christchurch Arts Centre. South Korean Jang was artist-in-residence at the Arts Centre earlier this year and many of her works are currently on show on bus stops and billboards around town - I featured some of them here last week in fact. I particularly like this series and the way the works turn the architectural heft of our Victorian Gothic stone buildings to something ephemeral and delicate. The location of this work too - tucked away under the elaborate staircase in the huge clocktower - is a nice surprise. It's like discovering a small glowing jewel in a dark corner.

It's all in the Title

Christchurch. September 2009. Ajr

I photographed this work last week in The Kiosk, that terrific little miniature exhibition space that stands amid pedestrian walkways at the juncture of High, Manchester and Lichfield Streets in central Christchurch. It’s gone now. I’m not sorry. The rather amorphous looking, glazed (ceramic?) mass had me scratching my head. Apart from its rather pleasing colour, nothing about it ‘sung out to me;’ I could make no associations to anything in the interior filing cabinet of my visual storehouse. Then I went around the other side of The Kiosk and saw ‘Adam Willetts: Sludge Beast from the Cosmic Nostril,’ written across the top of the glazed box. Quite frankly, the title and the reflections of the city beyond grabbed my attention far more than the work itself – which, if I’m at my cynical best, looks like a studio accident that the artist then decided to use anyway, christening it with the first title he could think of that somehow described it. I’m looking forward to a more arresting Kiosk placement next time round - it is after all, one of my favourite ‘gallery’ spaces. And if you'd like to see other works that have been displayed in The Kiosk, click on Kiosk or Physics Room in the label line below this post. The Physics Room website also has a comprehensive list (with photos) of all recent exhibitors. www.physicsroom.org.nz

Art in the Streets

Art has once again taken to the streets in Christchurch. I like that. I’m a great believer in art ‘going out to the people.’ I love the unexpectedness of coming upon a work of art in the everyday environment; and, placed among the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday existence, it has so much potential power to make us reassess our approach to art. I’m one of those people who actually sees art everywhere, in every corner of every street and I still believe most people move through their daily lives with their visual stimuli completely numbed over, missing a million visual miracles. That’s largely what this entire blog is about – communicating the small visual treasures that I see and experience everyday.

SO…. when someone like Korean artist, Sukjoon Jang ‘formalises’ art in the environment, I get very excited. Jang was artist-in-residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre in April-May this year and her large work, “Toyland” has been on show in the windows of SOFA Gallery in the Arts Centre for several months. Its stained glass, jewel-like colours give this grand old building a subtle visual lift. From a distance it looks like its always been there – just like stained glass; but when you get up close, you notice that Yang has compiled a colourful photographic montage of ‘a thousand’ coloured doors that she photographed in Christchurch industrial areas. Singly, the images are nothing special, but fused together into her enormous jigsaw-like montages, they take on a glowing new life. Who knew our industrial areas could look so good? Now Sukjoon Yang’s works have ‘marched’ beyond the Arts Centre to colonise the advertising spaces of notice boards and bus stops. I love the idea – and the way her large photographic prints (“social landscape photography” she calls it) are lighting up otherwise dull corners of suburbia.