SELECT/ed: Kapiti - Horowhenua Annual Review

9 May - 27 June 2010
 

Peter Hancock, Jon Live, 2010, courtesy of the artist

Select/ed is the Kapiti/Horowhenua Review, which this year has been selected by leading New Zealand arts patron Gillian Deane, and Wellington gallery director Mark Hutchins.

The exhibition also celebrates local music as one of Kapiti’s major artforms, and features a week of live music to contribute to NZ Music Month and coincide with Council’s Youth Week, from Friday 21 May - Saturday 29 May, with Kapiti Musicians, including: The Kapiti College Senior Girls Choir (who are heading to Melbourne soon), Barbershop and Chamber Music, E Hoa Ma, Sasana, Hectic Moments (Boggy - Paul Bognuda and Phill Simmonds), Raumati Straights (Troy Hunt and Nigel Patterson), Shayne Hurricane Wills, Karen Clarke, Three female vocalists from Kapiti College, Becci Luke, Kim Neilson & Izzie Austin.

The show features a wide mix of mediums, including sculpture, wood carving, mosaic, fabric, ceramics, jewellery and painting. The artists range from new and emerging, students from primary, high school and tertiary programmes, to established mid-career and senior figures, so is also a celebration of the way art operates in our daily lives at all ages.

Select/ed is extended by ten Artist’s Awards, which have been kindly supported by:
OPEN AWARD $1,000: John Mowbray Collectables - Stephanie Cahorel
HIGHLY COMMENDED $500: Landlink - Daisy Wood
Two STUDENT AWARDS of $250: Finman Services - Stuart Zohrab; Angus McDonald - Rochelle Maroon-Neale
EMERGING ARTIST $200: Barry Herbert - Sharon Hall
Four MERIT AWARDS $100 each: Kapiti Signs - Briar Grace-Smith; Ambrosia Patisserie - Kimbra Taylor; Adrienne Bushell - Jamie Spencer; Mahara Gallery - Lance Hirst
PEOPLE’S CHOICE $200: Barista Boys & Picture Perfect Framing - Amanda Sattler.

Votes for the PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD were taken over the duration of the show and the Award was presented at a special event with live music on 19 June, 1pm.
 

Frances Hodgkins: Kapiti Treasures

28 February - 2 May 2010

Frances Hodgkins, Painting class on a beach, 1920, Collection of Gillian & Roderick Deane

Frances Hodgkins: Kapiti Treasures reflects the special relationship that the Kapiti district has with New Zealand’s most famous and best-loved expatriate artist, Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947), through work gathered together for the first time from several significant private Kapiti collections. Included in the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Listen to Janet Bayly's interview on Frances Hodgkins with Chris Laidlaw, Sunday Programme, National Radio, Sunday 18 April 2010.
www.cushycms.com/temporary_uploads/71718/sun-20100418-0840-Janet_Bayly-048.mp3
 

LIGHT: Black & Silver

6 December 2009 - 31 January 2010

Megan Jenkinson, Atmospheric Optics 1, 2007, courtesy of the artist and The Real Art Roadshow


Mahara Gallery has been given the wonderful opportunity to curate a different show each summer drawn from the fabulous contemporary New Zealand art collection of the Real Art Roadshow Trust. This first show has been curated by Mahara Gallery Director Janet Bayly from the Trust’s Black and Silver Collections, with a focus on photography, extended by recent work by some of these and other artists. The work deals with the idea, material of, or associations with light, and ranges from photography and neon, through to painting, printmaking, ceramics and sculpture.

Artists include:
Laurence Aberhart, Wayne Barrar, Martin Basher, Victor Berezovsky, Sam Cairncross, Ben Cauchi, Chris Charteris, Octavia Cook, Shane Cotton, Maryrose Crook, Bill Culbert, Tony de Lautour, Siren Deluxe, Tony Fomison, Gary Freemantle, Megan Jenkinson, Darren Glass, Sarah Guppy, Patrick Hanly, Paul Hartigan, Ralph Hotere, Megan Hansen-Knarhoi, Richard McWhannell, Johanna Mechen, Anne Noble, Geoffrey Notman, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Reuben Paterson, Andrew Ross, Helm Ruifrok, Neville Smitheram, Kate Small, Michael Smither, Bill Sutton, Roberta Thornley, Charles Tole, Robin White, Dean Venrooy, Gordon Walters, Toss Wollaston.

 

Kapiti Coast Quilts

27 September - 25 October 09

This exhibition by Kapiti Coast Quilters includes School Houses, a collaborative quilt made secretly by 35 members of the 100-strong group as a gift to their retiring convenor, Gwynneth Carter, who lived in many school houses in the early years of her marriage to her husband Rob.

The exhibition also includes 50 stunning neo-natal quilts ‘made with love’ for premature babies at the request of Wellington Hospital’s Neo-Natal Unit. One was made by 12 year old Ilana Singleton, who quilt was judged the best entry by a Junior Member. She is the youngest member of Kapiti Coast Quilters, and is coached by her grandmother, quilter Virginia McKenzie.


 

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da
Tom Armstrong

23 August - 20 September 2009
 

Spring Circus (detail), 2009, courtesy of the artist

Tom Armstrong was born in 1964 and grew up in Waikanae. He studied art at Otago School of Fine Art in the 1980s then spent ten years in Europe studying and absorbing further art experiences. He returned around 2000 and has built a house and studio in rural Shannon, where he paints full-time. This is Tom’s first solo show, and features richly coloured and textured paintings and mixed media works all made this year.

The title Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da comes from the popular Beatles song, with its sing-song refrain of ‘how life goes on …’. Molly and Desmond go about their lives, doing ordinary things, experiencing the usual highs and lows, but as with all of us, whatever life throws at us … it just goes on regardless. Armstrong observes that when you look closely at the ordinary, it becomes extraordinary. (Say a word often enough and it becomes a strange new thing).

His themes also include Madonna figures; characters and performers from the circus; and elements of the local cultural and natural landscape: a magpie hovering, luscious red pohutukawa in flower, onions in neat rows in paddocks. The ringmaster presides over an elegant swooping acrobat, a knife-thrower steadies his hand, a variety of animals represent the lives we lead.

Spring, The Circus, The Bible, The Beatles and Denis Glover, by Janet Bayly

Mirek Smíšek 60 Years 60 Pots

21 June – 16 August 2009

Carved Bowl, salt glaze, cobalt manganese and iron on porcelain, c 1980's. Courtesy of Jeanne Macaskill

Mirek Smíšek (O.B.E.), born in 1925 in Czechoslovakia, has worked as a full-time potter in New Zealand for 60 years. This survey exhibition spans that period with 60 selected works. Smíšek is a major New Zealand artist who determined to devote his life to creativity as a positive response to the horrors he experienced during World War Two.

Having spent the past 40 years working on the Kapiti Coast it is appropriate that Mahara Gallery, the district’s public gallery, should mount this first full survey show. We are very grateful to independent curator Gary Freemantle for initiating and selecting it, and his sustained work in helping us to realize it: The selection was not guided by a fixed idea or credo, these pots were chosen instinctively. They very much selected themselves because they excited me. They stood out for their beauty of colour, texture and form.

Mirek Smíšek is a survivor who has maintained a strong sense of integrity to his creative convictions through many personal challenges and exterior influences. He has remained resolutely a potter: a maker of functional pottery that is designed to be used so as to combine the dual pleasures of function and aesthetics. That is why his artform is social; it relates to people and their activities. In this way his work comes alive when people are together and the pots are being used for their purpose, and this only increases one's enjoyment and appreciation for what he does.

Smíšek presents not only a stunning model of a lengthy and award-studded career as a potter, but of a creative life well-lived. He was one of numerous European émigrés to New Zealand after World War 2, who endured the German occupation of his homeland, and three years as a political prisoner in forced labour camps and prisons. He finally left post-war Communist Czechoslovakia in pursuit of his ideals of freedom and democracy. Smíšek formed a strong personal philosophy of the life-affirming value of creativity and the arts as a result of his war experiences.

Smíšek started working with clay in Canberra in 1948, worked briefly at Crown Lynn in Auckland in 1951, then established himself as Nelson’s first full-time studio potter in 1956. He worked and studied with international pottery masters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at St Ives and in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. After import restrictions were lifted in the early 1980's many NZ potters suffered from the deluge of cheap pottery that flooded the market. Some were made redundant and others tried to redefine their work in more sculptural terms. Smíšek has continued to survive and work resolutely as a potter, producing pots that people can use in their daily lives but also appreciate as an object that combines both function and aesthetics. Over the past 35 years he has established three studio potteries on the Kapiti Coast - at Manakau, Te Horo and now Waikanae, where he continues to produce new work.

Mirek Smíšek 60 Years 60 Pots is accompanied by an extensive catalogue reproducing all the work in the show, with biographical and critical essays by Janet Bayly and Justine Olsen, and is available to tour.

Mahara Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support from the Deane Endowment Trust, Creative Communities Kapiti, and Mission Hall Creative.

Songs of Innocence

Photographs of a New Zealand Childhood by John Pascoe

 

I do not hold myself out as an artist (photographic).
I am merely a traveller who reports with a camera.

John Pascoe, The Mountains, The Bush & The Sea, Whitcombe & Tombs, 1950.

John Pascoe (1908-1972) is best known for his documentary photographs of ordinary New Zealanders on the home front during the Second World War for the Department of Internal Affairs. Transcending simple record, the images define this era, and Pascoe as its leading photographic interpreter.

Songs of Innocence reveals a new view of Pascoe through his photographs of his daughters: Anna, Sara, Martha and Jane, made over twenty years.
The quality of this little known body of work from the family archive insists it be given equal weight to Pascoe’s established documentary photography: they interconnect in many ways. More than a survey of conventional family album images, it celebrates Pascoe's relationship to his subjects and his intuitive response to light through the elastic medium of black and white film.

Taking its cue from a postcard of William Blake’s poem ‘Infant Joy’, which Pascoe had pasted into the Pascoe Babies album, Songs of Innocence charts a family’s experience from the birth of their first child in 1942, through to the adventurous holidays undertaken by John, Dorothy and their four daughters during the 1950s. The latter images signal a recurring motif in Pascoe’s life of ‘a traveller who reports with a camera’.

Pascoe was committed to clarity, simplicity and unpretentiousness in his photography and writing. A self-styled 'Kiwi' individualist, he boasted having ‘done almost everything save bake scones’ with his camera. Yet his photographs of children highlight his personal and visual sensitivity, earning him the title: ‘artist (photographic).’

 

Living by the Sea – exhibition collateral

Mahara Gallery in Waikanae asked beach girl Linda to curate an exhibition for their summer show.

The exhibition focussed on the artists living on the Kapiti Coast and the art of living there. The catalogue extended the reach of the exhibition to include writers as well as artists and photographers. Designed like a glossy lifestyle magazine the catalogue was distributed for sale nationally. The exhibition was promoted with advertisements, billboards and flyers. Record breaking numbers attended the show and voted in the best sunset snap contest.

Te Kakakura

An exhibition celebrating the life of Te Kakakura Wiremu Parata (1835-1906) tribal leader, farmer, politician

ONCE-ONLY EVENT

'Te Kakakura was a leader who cemented for the coast a lasting peace during turbulent times in our history ... This exhibition is a wonderful collaboration of community and private spirit and energy’, Garry Nicholas, General Manager, Toi Maori

As a centennial event, this is a rare and unique opportunity to experience important taonga together with rich visual material which vividly bring to life a tribal, cultural and political figure of not only regional but national significance. The legacy of Te Kakakura Wiremu Parata is vividly presented in a contemporary context and for future generations.

Rarely-seen Taonga

Many of the items have not been seen before, even by whanau, of whom there are some 2.500 in the wider Wellington region. Mahara Gallery is in a unique position, through its partnership with the Parata family of Waikanae, in being able to present the taonga and images to a wider public. The gallery is today located where the thriving Maori village established by Wi Parata and his family developed in the late 19th century.

Bi-cultural leader

Te Kakakura Wiremu Parata, or Wi Parata, was born on Kapiti Island in 1835 to George Stubbs, an Australian whaler and trader, and Metapere Waipunahau, Chieftainess of Toa Rangatira. Te Kakakura was a nephew of Te Pehi Kupe, the hereditary leader of Toa Rangatira who had occupied the Kapiti Coast from the 1820s.

He became the largest landowner of the Waikanae area in the 1860s. He was a farmer, tribal leader of Toa Rangatira, Te Ati Awa. and Raukawa ki te Tonga as well as a Member of Parliament for Western Maori in the 1870s. He was an active supporter of pacifist leader Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and his brother Tohu. He also established a house at Parihaka, which was called Tararua.

In 1889 he gave the Wellington-Manawatu railway new access across family and tribal lands, thus opening the district for development. The meeting house Whakarongotai was hauled up from Waikanae beach by bullocks and Parata built an imposing new homestead beside it on the site of the present day Waikanae Hotel on SH1. The thriving new Maori village included Mahara House, a 'Superior Accommodation House' known as the 'pride and joy of Waikanae' in the 1920s and 30s. Across the railway line was Parata Township, with its streets named after his children. Ruakohatu, the family urupa where Wi Parata is buried, is on private land here. It is next to St Luke’s Church, which Wi Parata gave the land for, and is also celebrating the centenary of its consecration this month. Wi Parata's week-long tangi, 100 years ago in 1906, was a major event attended by the many thousands from all over the country.

The living legacy of Te Kakakura

The exhibition's rich mix of historical and contemporary visual material and taonga in many media will inform the descendants of Te Kakakura and his contemporaries in a vivid manner, and engage a wide range of visitors, with

Taonga on loan from private collections of whanau and special items on loan from Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, including:

Special korowai worn by Te Kakakura, three taiaha, a fighting woman's greenstone mere, a carved tiki, and numerous personal items

Historical documents including maps and plans presented on a large scale; also Maori and family Bibles, books and documents relating to the Waikanae Hack Racing Club, the founding of the Wellington-Manawatu railway line and other aspects of Wi Parata's professional and political life.

Original furniture from the old Parata homestead, two drawing rooms of which will be loosely reconstructed in the gallery

Strong visual images including many photographs, 19th century drawings, and representations of Parihaka

Contemporary work by artists descended from Te Kakakura such as Hariata Ropata Tangahoe, Hemi Sundgren and weavers Kohai Grace, Uruorangi Paki, Tracey Huxford, Adrienne Spratt and others

Interactive elements include a walking tour to important sites related to Wi Parata

Contact: Janet Bayly, Mahara Gallery, 04 902 6242 janet.maharagallery@paradise.net.nz

Dream Wheels

 

It started in America. The audacious automobiles that came out of Motor City - Detroit during the 1950s, declared that a new generation of designers had something sensational to say: something ‘breathless, but unverbalisable’
that went to the heart of the technological century. Speed, power, brutalism, luxury, snob-appeal, exoticism, and plain common-or-garden sex constituted a new design aesthetic that found favour with buyers eager to project their aspirations on to glamorous technology. The success of the new designers can be measured in the phenomenal sales that the US car industry achieved at its peak. What cannot be measured is the extent to which their creations have continued to fuel our cultural imagery, becoming gas-guzzlers for the popular imagination.

For Hollywood and a burgeoning youth culture motorcars like the ‘68 Ford Mustang would become vehicles of symbolism freighted with youthful rebellion, freedom and desire. Rockers, bikers, hot rodders, surfers, all placed the car or motor bike at the centre of their sub-cultures - not just for the thrills and freedom they promised, but for their symbolic resonance. Robert Irwin, who was an emerging artist in Los Angeles in the 1960s, recalled that ‘The car was the key, the pivotal item in the whole ballgame. Everything was wrapped around the car... Months and months went into getting it just right. Everything was thought out in terms of who you were, how you saw yourself, what your identity was’.

Today many contemporary artists - for whom popular culture is a rich resource - look back with admiration at the creative energy of the pioneering hot rodders of the 1950s and 60s. They admire the way old production cars became a point of departure for individual expression through blowtorch, hammer and spraycan. Today such expression, while it still has its backyard practitioners, is big business and a car can consume tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile the high-end of the motor industry continues to push the boundaries of precision engineering and consumer fetishism. Certain motorcars still have the power to confer status and encode identity for a price.

But the hot rod instinct persists. One of the legendary American hot rodder/customizers of the 1950s and 60s, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, reckons that what he and his friends got up to in their garages decades ago has affinities with what today's kids are doing with computers in their bedrooms. ‘These kids are getting it. They don't want to talk about car speed, they talk about computer speed. And about how to “hot rod” their software’.

Dream Wheels explores this cultural idea of the motorcar and ‘the romance of the road’. But the exhibition also touches lightly on the flipside of the dream: a future when the motorcar threatens to become an ecological nightmare.

Gerald Barnett, Curator

Parallel Praxis

Three photographers
Johanna Mechen/Andrew Ross/Paul Thompson

15 JULY – 19 AUGUST 2007

Parallel Praxis: Three Photographers presents three very different approaches to praxis - accepted or customary practice - in photography, as both a skill and an important contemporary artform.

Johanna Mechen is a Wellington-based photographer who works primarily with digital media. In A Familiar Practice, she has reworked ‘found’ photographic images, equipment and artefacts from the basement of a Newtown, Wellington house. Her almost sculptural darkroom objects and surreal images demonstrate a huge shift in photographic practices since the 1950s. Creative control has moved to the desktop, which Mechen uses with much skill and sensitivity, to explore memory and loss, themes still central to photography.

Andrew Ross has been photographing older buildings in the greater Wellington region for the last decade, using large format (8 x 10” and 4 x 5”) cameras and traditional photographic materials. His darkroom is in an old Newtown house he is slowly restoring. In the process he has built a remarkable body of work, of which The Odlins Building and Paekakariki Hotel portfolios are two recent examples. Ross describes his photographic practice as ‘an act of salvage’ for buildings, both humble and significant, that continue to be lost. Paekakariki Hotel (est. 1887) was demolished in 2005, and the iconic Odlins Building on Wellington’s waterfront has now been ‘refurbished’, rather than restored, after 20 years of neglect. Andrew Ross’s photographs pay a quietly tender and poetic tribute to the human history and values inherent in our built heritage.

Paul Thompson is a Wellington-based photographer who also lives on the Kapiti Coast, and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for 20 years. As a writer and photographer, Thompson has ‘a long-standing interest in the way that different art forms have deep similarities that often form a basis for an artist in one field to gain inspiration and ideas from another for work in their own practice’. The Language Series explores the relationship between the visual and the written, in his latest book, Shards of Silver, 2006. It investigates the interplay between photography and poetry, with work by 37 of New Zealand’s leading poets and Thompson’s photographs.

Parallel Praxis is extended by three moving image projects: Iris Garden, 1999, by Johanna Mechen, “NR”, 1983 by Paul Thompson, and Last Drinks, 2007, a video installation by well-known local film-makers Jeff Simmonds and Lindsay Rabbitt. It features the voices, personalities and sounds of demolition from the last days and hours of Paekakariki Hotel, on the Main Trunk Line at Paekakariki.

We would like to thank the artists and their supporters:
Adam Dransfield for Johanna Mechen, James Gilberd of Photospace Gallery for Andrew Ross, and Dave Kent of Idiom Studio for Paul Thompson.
Thank you also to Jeff Simmonds and Lindsay Rabbitt for making the video installation possible.

Mahara Gallery also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Kapiti Coast District Council, The Real Art Charitable Trust, and Mission Hall Creative and Kapiti’s Beach FM 88.6.