Sara Hughes - For Kultur

Both images: For Kultur - Sara Hughes, 2010, Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Photography David Frost The last time I featured work by Auckland artist Sara Hughes, was when she embellished Christchurch Art Gallery with her sensational coloured stripes....and you can see that work by clicking on Sara's name in the label line below this post. If nothing else, it will give you an excellent counterpoint to her current show at Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery - a warm, enticing show that is proving to be a winner with visitors to the gallery.

Three images above: For Kultur - Sara Hughes, 2010, Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Photography David Frost For Kultur is colourful installation and Hughes's first exhibition in New Zealand since returning from her pretigious art residency in Berlin. The work is Hughes's unexpected response to the wealth of objects held by the Hawke's Bay Cultural Trust and it brings a fresh perspective to the positions museums play in preserving the stories of our communities, histories and cultures.

Bottom image above: For Kultur - Sara Hughes (Detail), 2010, Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Photography David Frost.

Top image above: For Kultur - Sara Hughes, 2010, Hawke's Bay Cultural trust/Ruawharo Ta-u-Rangi, Pincushion, R165/18d, Photography David Frost. With over 100,000 individual items collected over 150 years, the Hawke's Bay Cultural Trust's collections offered the ideal place for Hughes to explore these ideas. Over the past six months she has been working closely with the the Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery team, discovering and uncovering different items within the collection. This research sparked an interest in how diverse objects can come together to create new meanings.

Applying these ideas to her practice as a visual artist, Hughes embarked on creating a collection of her own, exploring the different voices and associations that develop between her new objects and those held by the collections of the Hawke's Bay Cultural Trust.

The end result is a charming assembly of familiar objects that (literally) throw new light onto the subject of collecting. Unlike many installation shows that often strike terror into the hearts of the 'artistically uninitiated', For Kultur, is an inviting display that is drawing in enthusiastic audiences. It is the final major exhibition at Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery in the lead-up to the gallery's closure for re-development during 2010. A separate artwork by Hughes will become a significant feature of the new Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery wing when it re-opens. For Kultur runs until June 27. All images supplied by Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery. www.hbmag.co.nz

Museum and Art Gallery Redevelopment Announced

Image Courtesy Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery Great news announced last night! The Napier City Council has launched a $17-million plan to redevelop the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery and this is what it will look like - I think anyone who knows the existing building will agree this is a HUGE improvement. The redevelopment will kick off in mid-2010 and director of the museum and gallery, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins says he is committed to retaining the history and character of the current building while introducing light and space, and making better use of existing areas. "Our exhibitions are innovative and extremely well-received and we have some of the best collections in New Zealand but a lack of space means we aren't always able to fulfil our potential," he says. "This project aims to re-package the outside to match the wealth of objects and projects outside." The redevelopment will make full use of the existing architectural features and it will add more storage, work space and archive rooms. A work by one of my favourite New Zealand artist, Sara Hughes will also run the length and height of the facade of the new building, creating a striking first impression for visitors. Sara's work at Christchurch Art Gallery last year had a real WOW factor and you can see that if you put her name into my blog's search box, above left. It goes without saying that the redeveloped building will be equally enlivened by her bright, bold expression. The Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery has a rich history of cutting edge architecture. The first wing was designed by acclaimed Art Deco architect Louis Hay in the 1930s. The Century Theatre, which has become the cornerstone of culture and performance in Hawke's Bay, was designed in the 1970s by leading modernist architect, Guy Natusch; and the architect for the 2010 redevelopment is Richard Daniels of Opus International Consulting. Daniels was the lead architect on the Staples Rodway Building in Hastings and the new Hawke's Bay Regional Council offices in Napier. A project website has been set up and you can view redevelopment progress from today - August 8th - at http://www.forus.org.nz/. More information on Sara Hughes, who works with bold colour and repetitive pattern on a grand scale, can be found at http://www.sarahughes.co.nz/

Heavenly Stairway

Sara Hughes, "United We Fall." 2008. Ajr Call me crazy and irresponsible if you will but when I visited “United We Fall” by Sara Hughes at Christchurch Art Gallery in the weekend, I wanted to lick the gallery surfaces - so bright and enticing they were. Totally splendid!!! I love everything about it – and I wasn’t the only one. I noticed a lot of other gallery visitors smiling too. There’s just something irresistibly joyous about all that colour. If you want a few more details about the work itself, check the post I wrote here when it first went on display. www.christchurchgallery.org.nz.

When Art Meets Commercial Vinyl

Sara Hughes."United We Fall" 2008

(Artist's digital impression of the work)

Courtesy the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery.

Auckland artist, Sara Hughes appears to have a thing about commercial signwriting vinyl – and why not? It’s thin, adhesive, brilliantly-coloured and it lends itself to being applied to a multitude of unexpected surfaces. Take the main staircase of the Christchurch Art Gallery for instance – instantly transformed into a multicoloured work called “United We Fall,” as part of the gallery’s Outer Spaces series. Inspired by her recent United States residency during the Democratic primaries, Hughes has wrapped the stairs and glass barriers in politically-charged colours, “turning the gallery foyer into a cascade of marching, pulsating, saturated colour that questions both the local and global space it occupies.” You can see more of Sara’s interest in pattern, form and optical effects by visiting her website – http://www.sarahughes.co.nz/ In the meantime, I’m going to visit the gallery to see if I can get from bottom to top and down again only stepping on the red bits.