StreetscapeNZ - 88

Drews Avenue,

Whanganui

North Island

June 2010, Ajr

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.

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

Whispers

inform, High Street, Christchurch. May 2008. Ajr

When I was wandering around the city this morning I saw this terrific interplay of light, colour, form and reflection at inform, a classy little High Street gallery featuring contemporary New Zealand jewellery - a den of inspired craftsmanship. The window display is a work called “Whispers” by Wanganui glass artist, Katie Brown of the Chronicle Glass Studio. Chronicle, a co-operative of three glass artists – Katie Brown, Lyndsay Patterson and Karen Ellet – is so named because it occupies the historic printing press annex of the old Wanganui Chronicle Newspaper building in the Old Town Precinct, just up from the Wanganui River. www.chronicleglass.co.nz www.informjewellery.co.nz