Looking Glass

"New Beginnings" from 'Life Within Series, 2009. Ben Young.

Photo: Quinn O'Connell, Courtesy Sarjeant Gallery.

Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery has opened its first large scale exhibition featuring the work of New Zealand glass artists and I for one, wish I could be in Wanganui to see it. I like the central idea of the show – ‘reflecting ideas,’ which refers to the brief each of the 21 participating artists was given, “to reflect on the ways in which their idea had evolved, and show its relationship to their interest in glass and the process of making their work.” Each was asked to present a group of three works that would show the scope and development of an idea – in some cases one of the three pieces may be the trigger point for the final glass work, the source of their idea.

"Bombora Gigantes" 2009. Lee Brogan.

Photo: Lee Brogan. Courtesy Sarjeant Gallery

Wanganui is well known as a major centre of glass art in New Zealand. The then Wanganui Polytechnic (now Wanganui UCOL) started its glass studios way back in the 1980s. I was living in Wanganui then and was always enthralled by the stream of international glass artists who visited the polytech and its annual summer schools. Since then, the glass arts have flourished. Today the Wanganui Glass School is a leading glass teaching facility and around thirty practising glass artists live in the town. Wanganui also hosts an annual Festival of Glass in September, featuring exhibitions, hot glass demonstrations and studio visits. The Chronicle Glass Studio, home to a collective of glassblowers is also a major attraction. I love the fact that they’ve colonised the old, 1912 newspaper building in the old part of town near the river, converting the old press pit into their glass-blowing facility with a retail gallery in the mezzanine area above.

"Quill" 2009. Crystal Chain Gang: Jim Dennison & Leanne Williams.

Photo: Emma Smith. Courtesy Sarjeant Gallery. Throughout all that, the Sarjeant Gallery has been keeping an eye on things. Back in 2002 they hosted The Cast, which was followed in 2004 by Southern Exposure – two glass exhibitions that featured a range of practitioners. Initiated by members of the glass fraternity, they focussed on “what was happening there and then.” The current much larger exhibition, “Looking Glass: reflecting ideas,” has been organised by the Sarjeant and curated by Grace Cochrane and Sydney and Greg Donson, who were keen to “drill down deeper,” to offer insights into how each artist had reached their final creative work. The show continues at Sarjeant Gallery until March 14, 2010. www.sarjeant.org.nz www.chronicleglass.co.nz www.wanganuiglassschool.com www.wanganuiglass.co.nz

An Exploration of Place

Image Courtesy of Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare O Rehua - Whanganui Around twenty-two years ago when I lived in Wanganui, I worked with now-Christchurch-based New Zealand sculptor, Andrew Drummond, weaving willows to create the sculptural pieces for his incredible Dome installation at Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery. Andrew was the Tylee Cottage Artist-in-Residence at the time. Ever since then, I have been intrigued to see how the many artists since have responded to the gallery’s Dome space – I’ve even featured one or two of them here on this blog (just click Sarjeant Gallery in the label line below if you’d like to see them). Now it’s the turn of celebrated senior New Zealand artist, Bill Culbert. Culbert (b.1935), divides his time between London and France and this work – Bill Culbert 180˚ x 2 Whanganui (shown above) – is the only one he has completed for a museum during his time in New Zealand for the launch of the monograph of his life’s work, “Making Light Work,” which has been written by Ian Wedde and published by Auckland University Press. (He has also created a work which is showing at Auckland's Sue Crockford Gallery). Culbert spent three days in Wanganui back in 2008 noting ‘the ordinary’ in his surroundings – “vernacular architecture, tyre marks and architectural debris in salvage yards” – at the same time sensing and noting the power of the Whanganui River that runs through the town. According to the Sarjeant's senior curator, Greg Anderson, Culbert's resulting installation within the space is "an exploration of space, spatial reference and harmonies of theory and concrete reality. It is a re-telling of his experience and understanding of Wanganui, firmly and critically placed within the Dome area, which acts as the work's frame and context." “It is one of the characteristics of Culbert’s work that, as an artist, he seems to be ‘plugged in’ to the power and vigour of places and objects,” says Greg Anderson. “This kind of understanding, of the nature of things, imbues his installations with a depth greater than their sole sculptural appeal……In his pictures (eight large scale photographs of local sites) of Wanganui scenes, in his placement of fluorescent light tubing, he gives us and asks us, in our mind’s eye, to take a journey to the places he’s found and to experience the emotions and sensations he discovered during his Wanganui expedition.” Culbert’s show at Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare O Rehua - Whanganui runs until November 29, 2009. www.sarjeant.org.nz

A Marvellous Mayhem

Details from the London Town installations by Mark Braunias. Images supplied by Sarjeant Gallery.

Auckland-based artist Mark Braunias has a wonderfully dishevelled cast of characters ‘galloping’ across the walls of Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery in a work called London Town. Based on figures that have been “knocking about in his head space since his time as artist-in-residence at Tylee Cottage – March to May 2007” – the work is an intimate response to his time in Wanganui, filled with details of the local and social. “It’s not the big history he’s after but the small fry, the everyday, the funny, the folklore, the overlooked.” Braunias found that detail in old editions of the Wanganui Chronicle, stored on microfiche – particularly in the advertisements and especially those of a former Wanganui department store, Londontown, which was once in the town’s main street. At the end of his residency, he left town with a bundle of work books and drawings and has now returned to display the finished work – “a motley crew of characters colliding in – to paraphrase the artist – an elegant, stupid, anti-composition in the gallery space.” (From exhibition text by Greg Donson). www.markbraunias.co.nz www.sarjeant.org.nz

The Umbrella Project

The Umbrella Project. Top Dome Installation; Bottom: Pool Installation. Images Courtesy Sarjeant Gallery.

I LOVE this (top) photograph of the Umbrella Project which is currently installed in the dome of Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui. It was taken by the gallery’s staff photographer, Richard Wotton and brilliantly conveys the wonderful juxtaposition of whimsy and classical architecture. The work itself came about when nearly 60 Wanganui secondary school students attended workshops with well known Pacific Island artist, Michel Tuffery. It responds to the problem of graffiti and tagging in a positive way – and allowed the students to mark their umbrellas with Maori and Pacific inspired designs and references to their own identity. More than 250 finished umbrellas were then installed for one day at the now-disused Gonville swimming baths – a site that has been subject to excessive tagging and graffiti. The umbrellas have since been installed in the Dome of the Sarjeant, where they will stay until March 1, 2009.

Give Me SPACE!

Top: Elmgreen & Dragset, “Short Cut” Fondazione Trussardi, Milan, 2003. Photo: courtesy of the Artists. Bottom: Carmela Gross, “Aurora” (installation view at the Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art), Russia 2007. Photo: Carmela Gross The days are getting longer, the spring bulbs are flowering and that can mean only one thing – we’re closer still to the launch date of ‘Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space,” which opens in Christchurch on September 19. The SCAPE Christchurch Biennial of Art is New Zealand’s only international biennial dedicated to public art – and, as someone who has now photographed almost every piece of public art in the city, I’m looking forward to some new subject matter. And I’m thrilled to hear today that things are kicking off with the unveiling of Regan Gentry’s commission for a permanent sculpture for that ‘lost wilderness’ on the corner of Colombo and Hereford Streets that is now called Stewart Plaza. I featured one of Gentry’s works (now showing at Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery) here last week – put ‘Art & The Bridge to Nowhere’ into the above left search box to see it – and I’m looking forward to something dynamic and illuminated. In the meantime, here are works by two of the fifteen artists from 25 countries who will be participating in SCAPE 2008 - “Aurora” by leading Brazilian artist, Carmela Gross, whose text-based fluorescent signs will be sited in a high profile pedestrian traffic precinct in the middle of the city; and “Short Cut” by Berlin-based Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who have been collaborating since 1995. In 2005 they created a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texas desert. Roll on September 19 – let’s get the arts party started!

Going Nowhere - Again

"Landschaft - The Bridge to Nowhere, Whanganui" by Ann Shelton. Photo courtesy Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui Further to yesterday's post about the Bridge to Nowhere and Wellington sculptor, Regan Gentry’s fabulous work based on the bridge (see below), I am delighted to present another artist’s impression of the same bridge. This stunning photographic work is by Wellington-based artist/photographer, Ann Shelton. Ann has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and internationally and I hope you’ll all now tune into her website – http://www.annshelton.com/ – to see more of her exciting work.

Art & The Bridge to Nowhere

"The End of the Tether," Regan Gentry. Image: Sarjeant Gallery

I loved living in Wanganui in the late eighties but I’ve always regretted not visiting the now-famous Bridge to Nowhere that was built across the Mangapurua Gorge in 1936. I was always intrigued by the notion of new settlers - discharged servicemen from World War I- arriving in this wild, enormous landscape miles from anywhere, trying to make sense of their new lives as (modern) pioneer farmers. It didn’t work. The settlement was abandoned in 1942 and the new bridge, part of a planned road designed to link Stratford to Raetihi, became a fascinating relic. To cut a long story short (which is totally against my nature I might add), that same bridge has inspired Wellington-based sculptor, Regan Gentry in the creation of his exhibition “Near Nowhere, Near Impossible,” which is showing at the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui until August 31. The show concludes Gentry’s six-month artist residency at the very cute Tylee Cottage. I love this work (above), “The End of the Tether,” an ambitious replica of the Bridge to Nowhere made from manila rope. It’s installed across the two front bays of the gallery’s west wing and viewers have to walk under “the thicket of hairy macramé” to enter the space. www.sarjeant.org.nz