My initial impression is of a queer kind of museum. A long, low piece of furniture—resembling both a bench seat and a display case—supports a parade of condiments: squeezy bottles of mustard, cannisters of Tatua Dairy Whip cream, a huge jar of mayonnaise. They’re not the real things but immaculate casts made of pink silicone and black rubber urethane, visibly supple. Tall Perspex boxes are...
Kia orana. Welcome everyone to Andy Leleisiʻuao’s A Diasporic Pulse of Faith & Patience, his twentieth show with Ben Bergman. I would like to begin by extending warm congratulations and thanks to Andy and the team at Bergman Gallery. I feel honoured to speak here, both because Andy is one of the most highly respected painters practising in Aotearoa New Zealand, and because I have personally...
Few artists from Aotearoa deliver escapism like Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947). She has a gift for teasing out the transcendent in the world about her. An early watercolour depicts a Marseille so drenched in sun that balcony railings dissolve and women in no-nonsense skirts fuse together in the shadows. A late oil titled Zipp (1945) emphasises texture and colour so intensely that its sartorial...
For several months now, I’ve been living with an orchid. The relationship was arranged, and unanticipated. The plant turned up one day, an apology gift for my partner from a friend, and immediately became a source of anxiety for me. I’ve no green thumb—I can cause the demise of the least fussy of plants—and I’ve a particularly acute fear of destroying the beautiful: the panic of the art writer...
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.[1] —Gerhard Richter When presented with the pairing of Scarlett Cibilich and Denys...
Ka tīaho mai he marama pai,puta pō rere wai, mai a Pānia. When the night is still and the moon is clear,you can see Pānia appear. —Sam Freedman (nā Alby Bennett i whakamāori) Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room, or—given the artist’s enthusiasm for all things equine—the thoroughbred in the room: who the heck is PĀNiA!? In the literature put out by Mokopōpaki, the art space on...
Christina Pataialii is a painter of multiplicity. The works in On the Lam, her first dealer gallery show, are marked by an assured visual brevity, giving you more the more time you give them. They’ve an immediate and enduring formal and sensual appeal. The mint green background of Ace in the Hole is the work’s own winning card. It tugs at my visual memory days after encountering it for the first...
The 2019 Projects Programme is titled Whanaungatanga—an expression that may be translated in English as ‘kinship’. Whanaungatanga is a key element of the kaupapa of Mokopōpaki on Karangahape Road, whose ongoing support and teaching I sincerely acknowledge. The principle provides the basis for the selection process as much as a theme for the presentation. Having been involved in the two previous...
In 1995 I lost my virginity in the New Plymouth Public Library toilets whilst waiting for my shift to start at PAK’nSAVE. It was an unplanned event that unfolded like a slow dance. We never said a word to each other; it was all eye contact. It was during a time I had no other means of meeting men in New Plymouth. I somehow felt and knew that the library was where I was supposed to be, where it...
It’s nearly the appointed hour and I’m panicking. I begin to fold washing, but it’s still damp, so I resort to shunting the drying rack out of frame. I rotate a pot plant, so its handsome new leaf is on display. I nudge a painting straight, consider hanging another, reposition my computer on top of a stack of books, in order to improve the camera angle. For many years, Angela Tiatia and I lived...
