From a common ancestor
Auckland Museum's "most ambitious" travelling exhibition Vaka Moana - Voyages of the Ancestors is currently at Taiwan's National Museum of Prehistory and the National Museum of Natural Science. University professor and editor of the exhibit's companion book, Kerry Howe says: "The human settlement of the Pacific islands is not just a Pacific story. It is also the final chapter in the story of human exploration and settlement of our planet. With the settlement of the Pacific islands, we reached the end of our habitable world." Vaka Moana - Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific won the history category of the 2007 NZ Montana Book Awards.
(25 April 2008)

Toast of TriBeCa 
New Zealander Claire Fergusson has become a mainstay of the annual TriBeCa Open Artist Studio Tour (TOAST) in New York. TOAST is a free, self-guided tour of around 100 studios in the TriBeCa area, which aims simultaneously to empower working artists and provide an educational opportunity for the public. Fergusson first established her reputation as a performance artist at New York's legendary Franklin Furnace studio in the late 1970s. She went on to stage many of her performance pieces in NZ, including My Grandmother, co-starring a then 79-year-old Jessica Fergusson. This year for TOAST Fergusson will be exhibiting watercolour paintings as well as a series of sculptures. The event runs from April 27-30. 
(March 2007)

Hurricane warning 
NZ artist Lisa Ferguson is aiming to crack the competitive New York market after a successful period in London. The former graphic designer has already made a strong impression, with Art World News (USA) praising her ability to "[conjure] images of a hurricane of colours and emotions that [invoke] a new story with each viewing." Ferguson is showing a collection of her abstract expressionist pieces at Monkdogz Urban Art Gallery in Chelsea, New York, from February 1 to March 10. 
(January 2007)

Abstract revisited
NZ artist Angela Dwyer is staging two solo exhibitions in Italy in early 2007. The first is at the AMT Gallery in Como, the second at Milan's Magrorocca Gallery. Born in Palmerston North, Dwyer has based herself in Berlin since 1984. The exhibition at AMT is based around her latest major work; a 180cm by 700cm oil entitled This is Sexy. According to the gallery's press release, "This is Sexy challenges preconceptions about abstract painting ... Angela Dwyer is a master of colour and her new work proves it."
(January 2007)

Exhibiting art with Edge 
Always at the cutting edge, Wellington's City Gallery is using an interactive website and podcast in its current exhibition, Patricia Piccinini: In Another Life. An Australian artist, Piccanini is renowned for her sometimes creepy studies of humans, technology and the environment, and the effects they have upon each other. "After meeting Patricia and hearing her talk about her ideas and work, we concentrated on how we could share that very cool experience with people that would visit the show," says LA-based Tom Eslinger of Saatchi & Saatchi, Worldwide. "How can we use interactive as a channel to connect people more closely with Patricia's ideas?" Visitors can either download artist commentaries to a portable media player to use as an exhibition audio guide or use one of the pre-loaded iPods provided by the gallery. 
(29 March 2006)

Expat angst 
Hamilton artist John Hurrell writes about NZ artists living internationally in the February issue of Art Monthly Australia. He discusses last year's exhibition 'The expatriates: Frances Hodgkins and Barrie Bates' in the context of the NZ government's current $850,000 campaign to lure Kiwis home from abroad. "[2005] is a good time to look at the lives of two of NZ's most recognised expatriate artistic talents - the time they spent on the other side of the world in England and the mental vacillations they went through concerning 'home' and identity." The ambitious exhibition, which showed at Victoria University's Adam Art Gallery Auckland University's Gus Fisher Gallery, drew parallels between the unlikely duo of modernist Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) and conceptual artist Billy Bates (aka Billy Apple, 1935-). 
(February 2006)

WoWing the crowds
The 2005 World of Wearable Art (WoW) show – the first to be held in Wellington rather than Nelson – was a huge success, with a record-breaking 30,000 tickets purchased for the event. The show is widely regarded as a launching pad for careers in NZ’s booming film and fashion industries. Founder Suzie Moncrieff plans to stage the event in Australia, Canada, the U.K, and South East Asia in the near future, stating that “It has always been part of the vision to take it out into the world and be a showcase for NZ.” The supreme winner for 2005 was former Green Party MP Mike Ward.
(3 October 2005)
  

Practice makes perfection
Painter Max Gimblett is the subject of a lengthy article in premiere US art magazine, Art in America. Gimblett’s latest works were recently shown at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Critic Thomas McEvilley describes the exhibition as capstone or summation of an impressive 40 year career. “That there might be an overlap of meaning and intention between the New York School tradition and the Rinzai tradition of Zen painting has been remarked on before, but there has perhaps not been as perfect an avatar of the intersection as Gimblett … Like a traditional Zen painter, he will repeat a basic brush stroke over and over to arrive, through practice, at perfection through true spontaneity.” Gimblett has been based in New York since 1972, where he worked closely with kinetic artist (and fellow Kiwi) Len Lye, until the latter’s death in 1980.
(October 2005)
  

All Things Wild and Innocent.
One of our most internationally prominent artists, NYNZer Max Gimblett exhibited at San Francisco’s Haines Gallery in April. The 30 year New York resident’s refined and harmonious canvases are created utilizing a process akin to alchemy. Says critic Alan Bamberger: “I considered the considerable logistical challenges Max Gimblett must surely hurdle on the way to completing his art, including mastery of unconventional uses for unconventional mediums (polyurethane, polymers, gold, epoxy), and especially the skill and attention which he devotes to his art's edges (why so many artists think that nobody's ever gonna look at the edges, I have no idea, and I can't tell you how much art I see with edges that absolutely suck). Considerations duly considered, Max Gimblett gets thumbs up, hands down.”
(2005)

Archiball
Artist Martin Ball was the first New Zealand resident artist to be a finalist in Australia’s premier portraiture award, the Archibald Prize, with his painting of artist John Pule. The prize was won by Australian artist John Olsen. 
(May 2005)

Headlining act
Neil Dawson’s Fanfare sculpture provided the focal point for Sydney’s famous New Year celebrations. The 20m steel sphere, studded with more than 300 light reflective pinwheels, was suspended from the Harbour Bridge in the semblance of a giant disco ball. Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore described Fanfare as “stunningly beautiful.” The sculpture remained on display for the entire month of January. Dawson’s sculptures have hung in Paris, Kuala Lumpur, and Canberra as well as in Wellington’s Civic Square and Victoria University.
(14 December 2004)

   

From South Korea with love
NZ launched its inaugural South Korean Film Festival in Auckland on October 22. Actresses Chang Mi-hee and Park Sol-mi, directors Kang Je-gyu and Kwak Jae-yong, and critic Yu Gi-na attended the week long event, which featured such films as Tae Guk Ki, Yopkijogin Kunyo and Untold Scandal. NZ will also host its first major Korean art exhibition at the Waikato Museum of Art and History next year. Entitled 'Poetics of Line and Color: Korean textiles and costumes of the Choson Dynasty,' the show focuses on traditional Korean wrapping cloths (bojagi).
(27 October 2004)

Edge dimension
Textile artist Clare Plug contributed two works to the Fiberart International 2004 biennial, which recently moved to New York’s Museum of Arts & Design from the Pittsburgh Centre of the Arts. A review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes her pieces, Resonance and Promenade, as “exceptional … tactile and dimensionally illusional.”
(31 July 2004)
     

Paradise wow
The Asia Society Museum in New York is to host a major exhibition of contemporary New Zealand and Pacific Island art entitled Paradise Now? from February 18 – May 9. Michael Tuffery’s contribution, Povi Tau Vaga – a large bull (and functioning barbeque) made out of corned beef tins – will direct foot traffic to the gallery’s Park Avenue location, where works by artists including Lisa Reihana, Michael Parekowhai, John Pule, Peter Peryer, John Ioane, Ruth Watson, Niki Hastings-McFall, Shane Cotton, Bill Hammond, and Sofia Tekela-Smith will be exhibited. “The Asia Society is proud to be presenting this cutting-edge exhibition of works, which is the first US exhibition of contemporary art from NZ and the Pacific,” says Museum Director Vishakha N. Desai. “Not since the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Te Maori in 1984 has there been a significant museum exhibition on art from this region.” Curator Melissa Chiu: “NZ is the cultural, social, economic and political hub for the whole region and the centre for exciting work by a new generation of artists. The nation’s fascinating cross-section of European, Maori indigenous and Pacific Islanders exists nowhere else in the world, and its unique multiculturalism has not yet been explored by an exhibition of this scale.”
(21 January 2004) 

He is: Looking edge-ward for inspiration
This year’s recipient of Australia’s $20,000 Dobell Prize for drawing – Aida Tomescu – cites a work by Colin McCahon as the inspiration behind her winning piece, Negru III and Negru IV. “It triggered a series of memories or connections, some of them autobiographical,” she said of the unnamed McCahon.
(11 September 2003)
    

Crimewatch goes global
NZ tourists Olive and Graeme Reed have provided Scottish police with crucial evidence in one of the world’s biggest ever art thefts. The couple used their digital camera to snap shots of the robbers and their getaway car outside Drumlanrig Castle, as they made off with a Leonardo da Vinci painting worth between ₤25-50 million.
(7 September 2003)
   

Art-attack
September’s Art Monthly Australia includes celebratory reviews of Michael Stevenson’s This is the Trekka exhibit at the Venice Biennale, and the Stedelijk Museum’s Colin McCahon retrospective, currently showing in Melbourne. Louise Tegart on Stevenson: “This is the Trekka brings together a number of disparate objects to examine NZ’s industry and culture in the Cold War period, and opens up debate about the state of the visual arts in NZ today […] The new national economic project for NZ is to use art to place NZ on the world stage.” Mary Eagle on McCahon: “Any viewer, of whatever persuasion, who stops and looks is hit with a wham, for McCahon easily achieves his goal that the ‘emotion of a painting should fill a room’ […] Fuchs and Bloem [Stedelijk director and curator] say the voice spoke to them in Amsterdam from a dark corner of the Pacific and colonised their global sensibility.”
(September 2003)
  

Glass master #1
Wanganui artist David Murray has won Australia's prestigious Runamok Prize for Contemporary Glass Art for 2003 for his work entitled 'Gatherer'.
(September 2003)
 

East-side story
Te Papa's 'Japonism' exhibition reviewed in August's Australian Vogue. A joint collaboration with the Kyoto Costume Institute, the show explores the influence of Japan on Western fashion from 1860 to the present. 'Japonism' - which comes "in perfect sync with fashion's latest love affair with Asian influences" - brings together designs by Worth, Givenchy, Gucci, and Dior, as well as showcasing such Japanese luminaries as Issey Miyake and Yoji Yamamoto.
(August 2003)
  

Kiwi snaps up award
NZer Antony Rieck was named Photographer of the Year at the annual Florida Association of the American Institute of Architects design awards held on August 2. Rieck, who has a background in structural engineering and fine arts, was commended for producing "high quality and original still photography … that advances the cause of outstanding architectural photography."
(28 July 2003)
   

Serious as anything
NZ-born Mambo creative and ex-Mental as Anything guitarist Reg Mombassa turns his satiric talents to serious effect for Isle of Refuge, a show of 13 high-profile Australian artists protesting the treatment of refugees. "I felt ashamed about the way the [Howard] Government was treating them." Works include a "Beer-toting, olive branch-waving Jesus on horseback welcoming boatloads of refugees" and a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait as "a nerdy, thick-accented, gumboot-wearing refugee from New Zealand." 
(12 June 2003)

Seriously comic
The Weekend Australian profiles NZ-born and Ilam (University of Canterbury) trained graphic artist Colin Wilson. Virtually unknown in the antipodes Wilson has millions of avid overseas fans and after his accliamed work on the 2000AD (Judge Dredd) and French Blueberry comic series he is "a star ... in the pantheon of Eurpean cartoonists" with his original drawings coveted by collectors. Now Melbourne based Wilson is currently winning plaudits for his work on the futurist comic Rain Dogs and the noirish Point Blank. "I approach each story with the same excitement which a director brings to a film, which is really what comics are to me - mini-films. If I do my part well, hopefully, they come to life for the reader as well.
(14 June 2003)

Hillary on show
The National Geographic Society's Explorers Hall in Washington has opened an exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's Everest climb. Curiosities include the ice-axe Hillary used in the last few metres of his climb and a model crevasse which visitors can attempt to cross.
(17 April 2003)
   

Scream queen
"Eye-catching" sculptures and drawings by ex-pat Kiwi Francis Upritchard are currently on show at London's form-setting Institute of Contemporary Art, as part of the annual Beck's Futures award exhibition. Referencing Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, "she has torn up the floorboards and installed a creepy little bandaged mannequin, surrounded by souvenir-like, Egyptian-looking funerary urns. […] Nearby, drawings and notes appear to provide proof that Prince Charles is really the Beast of the Book of Revelation."
(8 April 2003)
   

What is this? New works by Frizzell
"They can be seen as postmodern hymns to invention and appropriation, or they can be read as theoretical texts that map the visual culture of at least two phases of the 20th century." Dick Frizzell's latest series of work, based around comic strip hero The Phantom, applauded in SMH. "The images float at the edges of the big story: saved or drowning heroines, domestic glimpses, coastlines and jungles strangely not unlike our own."
(5 December 2002)

Big Tex inspiration
Leading NZ artist Julian Dashper is currently on show at the Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery. The varied and interactive works (created during his residency at the Chinati Foundation in Texas) include a reproduction of his CV and a sound recording of public reactions to paintings by Jackson Pollock. Overall the exhibition reveals "a pared down aesthetic, a quality rather than a quantity."
(13 December 2002)
  

Magic: It's academic
Prominent University of Melboune based NZ-born theorist Simon During's Modern Enchantments reviewed in Guardian. During's "thorough and compelling" study challenges commonly held beliefs about the role of performed magic throughout history: "we milk the spectacle, he claims, not the other way round." His view that "academic neglect of the magic assemblage has blinded us to the immunities that audiences can (and do) develop" is an interesting spin on the modern tendency to blame mass media spectacle for societal ills. Harvard University Press: "During's superlative work [...] gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture."
(28 September 2002)

Politically correct

First
Wellington's City Gallery hosts a major retrospective of the work of internationally renowned Australian artist Tracey Moffat. Curated by Lara Strongman and Paula Savage, the important 15 year survey of her film, video and photo based work includes excerpts from the recent photo series "Fourth," featuring TV-swipes of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
(26 February 2002)
        

Moment in time
Photographic heavyweight Regan Cameron engages his lens in some model-watching to  "express the emotion" behind the new range from high-end watch-maker Patek Philippe.
(January 2002)
         

Cartoon commies
Cartoons from New Zealander David Low's ("the greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century") "Russian Sketchbook" on show alongside high-profile Russian cartoonists in the first exhibition run by Britain's new Political Cartoon Society.
(26 June 2001)

Kiwi curator appointed to prestigious post
Dr Christopher de Hamel has been appointed to one of the world's most prestigious library posts at Cambridge University's Parker Library. Formerly a senior valuer at Sothebys, de Hamel is the first Donnelly Fellow Librarian at Corpus Christi College, overseeing the construction of new housing for "one of the greatest treasuries of learning in Europe". 
(17 July 2000)
            Dr Christopher de Hamel has been appointed to one of the world's most prestigious library posts at Cambridge University's Parker Library. Formerly a senior valuer at Sothebys, de Hamel is the first Donnelly Fellow Librarian at Corpus Christi College, overseeing the construction of new housing for "one of the greatest treasuries of learning in Europe". 
(17 July 2000)
           

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David Low - century's best cartoonist - on show 
David Low, the New Zealand master satirist "with an outsider's perspective" and acclaimed as the Twentieth Century's greatest cartoonist has his work revisited (including his most famous caricature Colonel Blimp) in a major exhibition at British Parliament's Westminster Hall. MP Tony Banks: "Low was a prime example of how cartoonists could be both true artists and significant political commentators." Click here for a Guardian online gallery of his work.
(8 May 2002)
         

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Art for masses
LATimes cover story on art for the people in Chinatown, LA, features NZ artists and curators, including an exhibition at the Lord Mori Gallery, curated by Tessa Laird and Joyce Campbell, "featuring work by seven artists from New Zealand, a good number of which would be easy to love, including primitive paintings by Saskia Leek in which birds have musical notes coming out of their mouths and skinny Santas fly over picket fences". City of dreams? Also amongst the NZ art crew that has gone west to another periphery is Giovanni Intra's influential China Art Objects gallery. Above: Ronnie van Hout, Self Portrait, 2001, at the Lord Mori.
(31 January 2002)  

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Kiwi museum authority leads Berlin's Jewish Museum
Ken Gorbey of Te Papa, "New Zealand's enormously successful national museum," has been appointed artistic leader of of one of the new Berlin's emblematic projects: the Daniel Liebeskind designed Jewish Museum. Gorbey's challenge it is to oversee the "incredibly exciting project" of chronicling the flowering, destruction and partial rebirth of German Jewish life in a building of great power. 
(15 August 2000)

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Art letter to the world 
Peter Robinson and Jacqueline Fraser represent New Zealand 49th Venice Biennale. Fraser's work "invariably feeds off her knowledge and love of New Zealand, and particularly her Maoriness. Her work is of this place, about this place. It is a letter addressed to the world," says Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey.
(27 March 2000)
               

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Cyborg creatives
New Zealand artists working with cutting edge computer-based new media technology feature in Art Asia Pacific's feature "Interface: visions of the body and machine". Mauren Lander and John Fairclough are integrating traditional Maori weaving with the interactive and computer generated to test the limits of technology and aesthetic.
(July 2000)
              

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Kiwi Art Criticism: vol. #1
"The buttock of a dead cow washed up on the beach" was how Barbara Hepworth's sculpture Tosrso II was described when it arrived in New Zealand in 1963.
(8 June 2000)
               

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Tattoo culture
Renowned photographer Chris Rainier travels to New Zealand for his latest project on the culture of tattooing and scarification. Rainer features Maori tattoo art in his latest National Geographic spread.
(7 November 2001)
 

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Kiwis to illuminate the dark corners of history at Berlin's Jewish Museum
After gaining worldwide reputations for their work at Te Papa Ken Gorbey and Nigel Cox have been appointed to positions at Berlin's Jewish Museum, As Project Director, Gorbey will co-ordinate and manage the preparations for the museum's much anticipated opening next year. The building is designed by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind.  
(May 2000)

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Photography Master
American Photo Magazine lists New Zealander Regan Cameron as one of ten "photographic masters" throughout the world alongside such legends of the lens as Irving Penn and Annie Leibovitz. The October edition features Cameron's image of Madonna on the cover. See the Cameron entry in "Top 20 Young Fashion Photographers".
(November 2001)
              

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Museum reborn
A "New Zealand ancestor figure" is among the art on display in the inaugural exhibition at the revamped British Museum.
(4 December 2000)

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I am international
"He is the first important painter in that part of the world." The Netherlands' Stedelijk Museum is to hold the Western hemisphere's first major retrospective of Colin McCahon's work. "What at first sight would seem to be the naïve work of a religious believer from a distant corner of the world is revealed to be the explorations of a doubter whose questions and concerns have a much wider significance and add dimension to our view of postwar modernism." Simultaneous with the Colin ("the Van Gogh of Australasia") McCahon exhibition the Museum is presenting the work of NZ photogrpaher Laurence Aberhart.
(August 2002)
       

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Giovanni Intra remembered
We are diminished to report the death of Giovanni Intra in New York City on December 17th 2002. Giovanni, artist, critic, gallerist  went east to stir up the LA art scene and established the gallery,  China Art Objects, and its location, Chinatown, as a fresh new locus that, "changed the landscape" of the West Coast art world and was internationally regarded as one of the most influential new galleries. Giovanni was remembered in Art Forum, LA Times, New York Times, Las Vegas Sun, and The Independent. A tribute exhibition for Giovanni will be held at The Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington from January 18th - February 1st. Kelly Carmichael's NZEDGE profile of Giovanni remains here.
(17 December 2002)
      

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How to remember the holocaust?
As conceptual architect of the "extraordinarily popular Museum of New Zealand Te Papa" Ken Gorbey has earned a reputation as a world leader in museum innovation - head hunted to be project director of the much anticipated Jewish Museum, Berlin. Gorbey says Te Papa is "a celebration of New Zealand culture"; in Berlin he is challenged with a history "that in reality cannot be celebrated."
(12 February 2001)

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Infant igenues
NZ's best-known baby-snapper, Anne Geddes, interviewed in The Baltimore Sun. "Other photographers say to me, 'Oh, I used to take pictures of babies' - implying that they went on to better things - but I think babies are undervalued as artists." Geddes' latest book, Pure, has just been released in America.
(20 January 2003)
   

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Pastoral in pieces 
Auckland pebble mosaic artist John Botica has created what is considered, in the specialist publication Mosaic Art Now, one of the world's top 100 contemporary mosaic works. Botica's 'Tree of Life' was commissioned by the North Shore City Council and installed at a children's playground in Greenhithe. The 4.2m diameter mosaic took him three months to complete, and that working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Botica says: "I've discovered the passion of my life and I want to promote New Zealand world-wide through my art. I work both domestically and internationally, providing a full service from original design to final installation of pebble mosaics." 
(28 April 2008)

Art of ice 
New Zealand artist David Trubridge features at San Francisco's Natural World Museum in an exhibition entitled Melting Ice: A Hot Topic, which addresses the theme of climate change from a global perspective. Trubridge's 'On Thin Ice' is a series of three panels of "dark rolled steel sheeting riven by laser cuts, with the cracks getting bigger in each panel until the last one shatters into a maelstrom - a schematic of melting sea ice as seen from above." Trubridge's trip to Antarctica as an Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellow in 2004 inspired the installation. Melting Ice next moves to Chicago where it runs until September 1. 
(21 April 2008)

Sculptured theme park 
Since 1992, New Zealand art collector Alan Gibbs has commissioned both national and international artists to contribute to a sculpture park on his farm in Kaukapakapa, Auckland. New York artist Tony Oursler's video projections are the latest addition, to what Men's Vogue describes as the most outlandish private art playground on earth. Oursler's images are floating women, writhing snakes and pyrotechnics. Sculpture is Gibb's main interest and artists include: Ralph Hotere, Daniel Buren and Richard Serra. Alan Gibbs told Vogue he wants his sculpture large: "I don't want any wimpy pieces in the landscape."
(February 2008)

Drawn on difference 
Preeminent documentary photographer Mark Adams is making his North American debut with the exhibition Tatau: Samoan Tattooing and Global Culture at Canada's Ontario College of Art & Design. The exhibition explores the Samoan tattooing tradition of tatau as an example of cross-cultural collaboration and cultural diversity. Gallery curator Charles Reeve says the "beguiling" photographs describe distant cultures while raising relevant issues in Canada. Adams' work has been shown extensively throughout New Zealand, Europe, Australia, South Africa and Brazil. His books include Land of Memories and Cook's Sites. The exhibition runs 15 February through May 18, 2008. 
(14 February 2008)

Portrait of a lady 
New Zealander Daisy Wilkie has been immortalised in oil for Australia's leading portrait prize. Australian artist Malcolm Smith chose Wilkie as his Archibald Prize subject after meeting her at one of the art classes he hosts in Cronulla, Sydney. Wilkie, 75, was born in NZ and is a descendant of Te Rauparaha. "I've always been terribly proud of my heritage; there is something spiritual that ties me to New Zealand," she says. The AU $35,000 Archibald Prize is Australia's most prestigious award for portraiture. This year's Archibald winner will be announced in March. 
(8 January 2008)

Magic realist 
Aotearoa North Carolina (US) artist Robert Johnson has just returned from a three month stint in NZ. The magic realist painter bought an old van in Auckland and toured the country from north to south. His resulting works are being shown in Asheville, North Carolina, in an exhibition titled Robert Johnson's New Zealand. "[NZ has] evolved quite separately from all other parts of the world," he says. "New Zealand is one of those places I've always been fascinated with." Johnson's works combine meticulously rendered flora and fauna with native motifs and unusual representations of space and dimension. Robert Johnson's New Zealand is on at Asheville's Blue Spiral Gallery until December 29.
(2 December 2007)

Hot shot 
NZ photographer Stefanie Young is part of a group show called Tripping the Light Fantastic, which has just opened at the Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Young, who currently lectures at the Waikato Institute of Technology, describes her black and white prints as "translating a representational, perceptual experience". Young holds a MFA in photography from the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York, and has exhibited widely in NZ, Australia and the US. Tripping the Light Fantastic runs from November 20 to December 11. 
(November 2007)

Geddes gets personal

Bold type 
Auckland-born artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) features in graphic design magazine Eye's special typography issue. Gascoigne's large, collage-like art works are primarily made from found objects, including abandoned road signs, stencilled packing materials and other text-heavy forms. Gascoigne moved to Mount Stromlo, just outside of Canberra, in 1943, and at the age of 64 became the first woman to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. Eye: "Approaching 70, she hit her stride, making electric images of distilled experience, visual poems that meld culture and nature, language and landscape ... This creative response to her countryside produced some of Australia's most inventive typographic imagery, now celebrated as some of its most iconic contemporary art."
(September 2007)

Glass half full 

High price for Anzac artwork 
An iconic Anzac painting has sold for more than twice its estimated price at an auction of wartime artworks in Sydney. Simpson and his Donkey by NZ artist Horace Moore-Jones was purchased for $120,000 by an anonymous buyer. The painting depicts an unknown wounded soldier on a donkey being led by an Anzac medic, with the Gallipoli peninsula in the background. Controversy surrounding the medic's identity probably contributed to the unexpected sale price. While some believe the artwork represents John Simpson Kirkpatrick, a British-born medic with the Australian Field Ambulance, others claim it is taken from a photograph of NZ Field Ambulance medic Dick Henderson, who replaced Kirkpatrick. Moore-Jones produced five originals of the painting in 1917 while living in Dunedin. 
(30 April 2007)

McCarten joins local colour
Auckland-born Donald McCarten is a featured artist in the upcoming ColorField.remix event in Washington D.C. The four-month event celebrates the American capital's influential 1950s/1960s Color Field visual art movement, of which McCarten was a pivotal member. "This is an exciting opportunity to examine and celebrate Washington DC's artistic history, its international context and the impact of Color Field painting," said Judy A. Greenberg, director of The Kreeger Museum. "The number of organizations participating in this celebration is evidence of how profoundly the Color Field movement permeated the consciousness of Washington's cultural life in its time, and how it continues to sustain and inspire artists today." Donald McCarten, who died in 2003, studied at Auckland's Elam School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. He spent time painting in Australia, England, Europe and South Africa before immigrating to the US in 1958. His boldly coloured works, frequently on abstract-shaped canvasses, were exhibited alongside those by Color Field contemporaries Jacob Kainen, Howard Mehring, William de Looper, Paul Reed and Gene Davis. ColorField.remix runs from April 1-July 28. 
(March 2007)

Indigenous art in the spotlight 
The Musée du Quai Branly, French President Jacques Chirac's long-awaited €235.2 million shrine to indigenous art, was officially inaugurated on June 21 in Paris. The Quai Branly boasts a collection of 300,000 works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, including a 19th-century Maori woman's cloak, the prows of a war canoe and a carving from a marae entrance. Contemporary photographic works by Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Pardington are exhibited in the museum's garden. French opinion is hotly divided over the Quai Branly - while some hail it as a symbol of the universality of art, others see it as an archaic reminder of European colonialism. Chirac has made it his project since 1996. "There is no hierarchy among the arts, just as there is no hierarchy among peoples," he proclaimed at the inauguration. 
(21 June 2006)

A life in pictures 
NZ born artist Derek Ward was the subject of a retrospective exhibition recently staged in Norwich, England. Ward was born in Richmond, NZ, in 1922 and relocated to England with his family aged 7. "Art for me is essentially a form of meditation and I avoiding discussing my work with others for this reason," he says in an interview with Norwich Evening News. "If I feel the need for recharging my work I walk along a Norfolk beach and look at the pebbles there." 
(21 March 2006)

Nature’s best
New Zealand enjoyed success at the 2006 Black & White Spider photography awards, with Jason Boa winning third place in the Nature category for “Field Waimate” and Jocelyn Carlin gaining an honourable mention in the same category for “Cabbage Tree”. The prestigious annual black and white photography awards are judged by some of the most highly respected members of the industry, including David Clarke, Head of Photography at The Tate London, Alicia McWhinnie, Editor of Black & White photography magazine and Eric Browner, Administrator of the Man Ray Trust.
(13 February 2006)

Up-and-coming Upritchard 
Artist to watch Francis Upritchard features in the 48th issue of Object magazine. "An exciting talent … Upritchard's art locates value in the personal and the imperfect … [She] finds a way of accommodating beauty, rendering it approachable, a part of life, freeing it of conspicuousness and convention." The Ilam graduate is now based in London, where she has set up the Bart Wells Institute (an emerging artists' gallery collective) with friend and fellow artist Luke Gottelier. "It is hard to make art on your own, and in NZ you are very much alone," she explained in a NZ Herald interview. "[But] my family is here, and I want to suck NZ back into me because I'm a colonial in England. My friends forget about that, but I need to stay different, I need to stay a visitor."
(December 2005-March 2006)

Army colonel turned art critic
Prince Andrew made a fleeting visit to NZ this month, chiefly to spend time with the army’s Logistic Regiment, which he has headed since 1996. The Prince made international headlines with his humorous interpretation of a new sculpture commemorating the 200th anniversary of Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. “This sculpture is, um, interesting,” he said of the tangled knot of grey steel rods before being drowned out by laughter from the crowd. He then pulled it together with “Those ties finally bind victor and defeated. They also bind countries like the UK and NZ together,” amidst a storm of clapping.
(1 October 2005)
   

Midwestern Dashper
The Sioux City Art Center is to show Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand’s Julian Dashper. This is the first ever travelling retrospective of a New Zealand-based artist to be organized by an American museum. Dashper has maintained a prolific international art career from his home base in Auckland since the early 1980s, having participated in over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide. His art is in the renowned collections in Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, and all the major public and private collections in NZ. Spanning the past 25 years of Dashper’s art, the exhibition features over 30 works including paintings, photography, sound recordings, videos and readymade objects. Through a concept-based art which focuses on both the formal and conceptual elements of the artwork, Dashper explores the global exchange of ideas about so-called international styles (such as American Modernism); the reception and dissemination of visual culture; and the subversion and re-positioning of what is often considered marginal elements of the artworld, such as its institutional framework. The show opens August 6 for three months. (27 July 2005)

National Ikon
An Independent obituary for Pat Hanly calls him “the jester of modern NZ art … His images - exuberant, colourful, feisty and humorous - reflected the personality of their maker.” The subjects of Hanly’s works ranged from domestic scenes to re-enactments of his famous anti-nuclear protests. In the 1998 film Pacific Ikon, shortly after he was diagnosed with Hodgkinson’s disease, Hanly stated “We are awaiting death with interested anticipation. Some of my best friends are dead.” He is survived by wife, muse, and fellow artist Gillian Taverner (Gil Hanly).
(19 November 2004)

Textile success
Promenade by Clare Plug won the Marianne Kor Award for Distinguished International Entry at the 2004 Fibreart International exhibition in Pittsburgh. Two of Plug’s pieces were selected out of 1,600 US and international entries for the prestigious 62-work exhibition.
(August 2004)

Sterling edge
Leading contemporary jewellers from both sides of the Tasman took part in a Melbourne exhibition entitled Cross Pollination. Curated by Vicki Mason (NZ) and Anna Davern (AUS), the brief was to design a modern interpretation of the fern brooch presented to Queen Elizabeth at the 1956 Sydney Olympics. NZ participants included Warwick Freeman, Kirsten Haydon, Niki Hastings-McFall, Lynn Kelly, and Tania Patterson.
(27 July 2004)

Tales from the city's edge
Canterbury School of Fine Arts graduates Kent Bell, Sara Givins, Damon MacLeod, Rachel Brown, and Reece Sanders have mounted a joint exhibition at Melbourne's Conical Gallery, running April 23 - May 8. Entitled City Psyche, the show wittily explores the often tenuous relationship between fantasy and reality informing our everyday urban existence.
(23 April 2004)

Brothers in arts
An opinion piece in the Age asks: “Why don't Australian and New Zealand arts sectors cooperate more?” The lengthy article examines the difference between the two nations in regards to arts funding, profiles the few artists enjoying a successful trans-Tasman career, and addresses the film industry phenomenon that is Peter Jackson (“Before Peter, people like Jane Campion had to go overseas to build their careers.”) NZ film commission head, Ruth Harley, suggests forming Tasman Inc. to promote industry development on both sides of the ocean: “The Scandinavians do it and so, on a broader scale, does the European industry as a whole. There is already a good level of collaboration, but I don't think that Australians realise the NZ industry is relevant.” Post-Oscars claims of an Antipodean invasion of Hollywood - such as the Guardian's 'The Australasians are coming!' -   hint at a powerful and unified strength amassing Down Under; perhaps it's time to make it official.
(24 March 2004)
   

Mccahon's edgy new-world modernism 
Peter Hill's review of the Stedilijk Museum's Colin McCahon exhibition - now showing in Sydney - perfectly encapsulates the New Zealand Edge. "Enough time has passed for a shift between the centre and the edge of modernism to occur. Rudi Fuchs, director at the Stedelijk Museum and veteran director of the Venice Biennale says: 'When Edvard Munch became more and more personal and introspective in his art [...] he was discarded for a while; the same happened with Asger Jorn, and also with Joseph Beuys in his early years. We now see those judgements as wrong. When such different positions slowly begin to emerge at what before had been considered the periphery, the centre automatically weakens and can no longer maintain its authority. So it was from this perspective that I began to see the work of Colin McCahon.'"
(14 November 2003)
    

Big McCahon: harbinger of art globalisation
In a substantial feature, 'Spreading the word', in international art world standard, ArtForum, Thomas Crow talks to Stedelijk Museum curator Marja Bloem about the growing international reputation of Colin McCahon. Crow urges globalisation in art to extend to the edge. "Globalization, our mantra of the moment, only carries so far where art is concerned. A case in point: A major contemporary of Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Twombly, and Johns - an artist fully at their level of achievement - is in the midst of his first major touring retrospective. Most of you reading this will be in no position to see it. The artist is Colin McCahon, and, yes, he is that good." Crow ends with the powerful prophecy: "That leads to the question: Might McCahon be better or more usefully understood outside of his own time? Beyond New Zealand and Australia, at any rate, he's a new artist. Might it be the case that his day for Europe and for America has only just arrived?" Above: North Otago Landscape 8 (1967)
(September 2003) 
      

Twisted sister
NZ artist, Anne Shelton, featured in Vancouver’s annual gallery-crawl, Swarm – described as “for many … the only gallery-going to be accomplished all year.” Shelton’s eerie photographic diptychs portray the scenes of actual murders: “Each location, photographed in a cinematic style, forces the viewer to consider the ways we fictionalise tragedy - we make stories, movies, myths, out of someone else's disaster. The broad daylight in these landscapes is a deep freeze; the absence of any human life makes them gorgeously austere.”
(9 September 2003)
    

The poetry of exile
Displaced artists and writers from around the world gathered at Auckland University in July for a 3-day conference examining the link between exile and creativity. Organised by Professor Mike Hanne and officially opened by PM Helen Clark, 'The Poetics of Exile' brought together artists from Iraq, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Hanne described the conference as "an opportunity to review the extraordinary creative contribution that people who have lost their homeland so often make to the country they settle in. Specifically, it is a chance for New Zealanders to understand that refugees aren't just people who need help to fit in, but people who have much to offer." A message that speaks to NZ's own creative diaspora?
(17 July 2003)
    

Kiwi car culture laps Venice
NZ's representative at the Venice Biennale - Michael Stevenson - praised in Time Pacific for his "finely calibrated sense of irony." Stevenson's main installation - 'This is the Trekka' - places NZ's Cold War era attempt at a mass-produced all-terrain vehicle in the incongruous surroundings of an 18th century Venetian church. "Employing fictional devices and conspiracy theories, Stevenson cleverly concocts a time capsule of NZ before globalization, of innocence mixed with paranoia."
(27 August 2003)

In love with Earth's wild places
Celebrated NZ photographer, Wayne Papps remembered. Papps was best known for his striking images of Antarctica, which he produced as a member of the Australian Antarctic Division. Regarded as one of the world's premiere wilderness photographers, Papps, 43, fell to his death while taking pictures on Bruny Island last month. Australian Antarctic Division director, Tony Press: "Few people have captured the many moods or the spirit of Antarctica as Wayne has done … He was a consummate perfectionist and, like a number of truly creative and sensitive artists, an unassuming and modest man."
(4 June 2003)
     

Peter Robinson: "Migrateur"
Artist Peter Robinson, exhibiting in Berlin, described in ArtForum as "[fitting] the profile of the artist as a global player ... a migrateur in the emphatic sense." Aware of his edge exoticism but fused in global media culture, his Venice installation mixed premodern Maori myth with cybernetic models. Harald Fricke reviews his recent collection of 25 drawings, which fuse 'kiwi style' appropriation of pop iconography with "high-brow" theoretical explorations. Fricke: "[Robinson's works] are about weathering the contradictions that arise from the mixing of cultures. For him, equanimity and vexation about this state of affairs go hand in hand."
(May 2003)
   

Byow! cartoonist with cut through remembered
John Kent, well-known political cartoonist, lecturer and illustrator, died on April 13 aged 65. Born in Oamaru, Kent's work was a familiar feature in Private Eye,  Guardian, Daily Mail, The Sun and, finally, The Times. He will be remembered for such original and provocative strips as Grocer Heath, the long running political and sexual satire Varoomshka, Fifth Form at St Maggie's and Cap'n Bob. "New Zealand politics were rough on the surface and rough beneath; British politics seemed perfumed with courtesy, but oiled in subtlety. The culture shock gave him the clarity of vision to cut through the cant and the double standards."
(19 April 2003)
   

Premium quality: South Seas art
Aotearoa-Pasifika artist Michael Tuffery talks to the ABC about recycling identity. Tuffery has recently completed an artist's residency at Artspace Mackay in Queensland, Australia., where he ran a series of workshops for aspiring  artists from the South Sea Islander community, inspiring art out of found materials (see Tuffery's bullish [sic] life size sculptured bovine made out old corned beef cans, displayed at Te Papa). The resulting collection - Animated Effigy - opened the Beneath Monsoon exhibition held at Artspace over March and April.
(7 February 2003)
  

With eyes for art 
New Zealander Jennifer Flay, artistic director of Fiac (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain), is heading a break-through at the contemporary Parisian art fair, a role she was appointed to in 2003. "While location is one of Fiac's trump cards, it has others. French resident and ex-dealer Jennifer Flay is universally praised for adding a more international dimension to the fair," writes The Art Newspaper. "This year 61 per cent of exhibitors were non-French." Flay ran her own gallery in Paris, Galerie Jennifer Flay, for 12 years. Attributed with an expert eye and a flair for discovery, Flay was one of the first people to exhibit the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andrea Zittel, John Currin, Karen Kilimnik, Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster and Claude Closky. 
(30 October 2008)

Alive in New York
Auckland multimedia and performance artist Shigeyuki Kihara will make her North American debut at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exhibition called 'Living Photographs'. During the exhibition, Kihara will also perform 'Taualuga: The Last Dance'. The performance combines photography, traditional dance, audio, and historical costume to form a tribute to the many leaders and people of Samoa. "Shigeyuki Kihara was born to defy categorisation, her very existence blurs and challenges the organisation of mainstream thought and practice," Hawkes Bay artist Jim Vivieaere has said. Earlier this year the Metropolitan Museum purchased two works by Kihara to add to their permanent collection. Kihara was born in Samoa and immigrated to New Zealand in 1989 at the age of sixteen. 'Living Photographs' runs October 7 through February 1, 2009. 
(18 September 2008)

Ideas of transformation 
Upper Hutt-born painter Shane Cotton recently held a three-month residence at Sydney's Artspace where he prepared works for upcoming 2008/9 shows at Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland and Kaliman Gallery in Sydney. Art World's Laura Murray talked to Cotton in Sydney about his latest paintings and the "idea of change; of something that is about to happen or has just happened." "Dream Number 1 (2008), from a suite of four," describes Murray, "is a confronting yet perversely beautiful painting. Uncluttered. There is, as Cotton remarks, 'space for things to happen, for contemplation'." Cotton is one of six New Zealand artists commissioned by The Pindrop Foundation to produce ten limited edition box sets of screen prints for the 2008 Art of Hearing initiative, which raises funds and awareness about cochlear implants.
(August/September 2008)

Art's urban sprawl  
Christchurch hosts art biennale SCAPE 2008, a city-wide exhibition of new work by New Zealand and international artists all exploring the concept of cities as spaces reflective of social change, "constantly in flux." 'Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space' is co-curated by New Zealand's Danae Mossman and Turkey's internationally renowned Fulya Erdemci and runs for six weeks from 19 September - 2 November. The title 'Wandering Lines' is drawn from the notion that "indirect or errant trajectories obeying their own logic" can provide new understandings of space. SCAPE director Deborah McCormick says this year's exhibition will challenge people's perceptions of the city. "It will be a response to the changing nature of cities globally," McCormick says. New Zealand artists represented include Pop artist Billy Apple and sculptor Lonnie Hutchinson. 
(4 July 2008)

Readymade mule at Basel 
Et al.'s exhibition 'altruistic studies' - a "non-peopled, computer-generated performance" - installed at the Basel art fair in early June, their fourth at the international show, has once again sparked curiosity about the group's identity. Et. al consistently covers its tracks - it promotes confusion about its practice, is consistently mysterious about the number and gender of its membership, and has even "denied" the authenticity of previous works. One of the interpretations of their work is that they are commenting on the generic role of the artist as a figure of authority, their own acts of suppression while enforcing that role, and the New Zealand art world's complicity with that fact. It's the complex layering and seesawing of their material that makes et al. so intriguing. 
(June/July 2008)

Room in Europe 
Anne Noble, one of New Zealand's most respected photographers, began the European tour of her provocative exhibition Ruby's Room in Paris at The Musée du quai Branly in January. Part of the museum's inaugural visual arts biennale PHOTOQUAI, Ruby's Room is a series of large scale images which challenge conventional portraiture of childhood. Noble shot the series of digital prints of her daughter's mouth, and what Ruby does with it, as "an alternative archaeology of childhood". The museum describes the collection of 40 images as "deliberately disproportionate compared with the apparent banality of the subject ... highlighting details of the mouth in a rather unusual manner." 
(18 January 2008)

Grand statements
Auckland artist Dane Mitchell, 31, has been selected to exhibit at Miami's prestigious Art Basel fair in June 2008. Mitchell's work will feature in the Art Statements section for emerging artists, and will be presented by Auckland gallery Starkwhite. Only 20 exhibitors per year are selected for Art Statements, which has launched the careers of international art luminaries such as Vanessa Beecroft, William Kentridge and Mariko Mori. 2008 is shaping up to be a busy year for Mitchell. As well his Art Basel appearance, he will stage a major solo exhibition at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne, participate in a group show at Galeria Triangulo in Sao Paulo and, from October to December, will be artist in residence at Gasworks in London. 
(November 2007)

Finding beauty in the everyday 
Six NZ ceramic artists, including the collaborative couple Philip Jarvis and Madeleine Child, are exhibiting together at the annual Craft Victoria festival in Melbourne. Titled Best in Show, the exhibition is a playful tribute to agricultural shows and everyday domestic objects. Child's featured clay works include giant Cheezels and popcorn, while her partner, Philip Jarvis, has used the medium to create toothpaste tubes, Monopoly game pieces and sandcastles. Child and Jarvis are based in remote Aramoana, where they share a studio and numerous art projects. "Sometimes you think you don't know what's going on elsewhere [in the art world] but it's also about having the time and freedom to work without outside influences," said Child in The Age. Best in Show runs until December 1. 
(25 October 2007)

Saatchi Showdown runner up 
Nelson-born artist Charles Olsen was runner up in the inaugural Saatchi Showdown, an online user-voted art competition run by London's Saatchi Gallery. Olsen received ₤750, and priceless media exposure, for his oil portrait La Sundari. First place went to Italian photorealist painter Vania Comoretti. Olsen has been based in Madrid for the past four years, where he runs Myspace pages promoting NZ and Spanish artists: 'Aotearoa Artists' and 'Artistas de España'. 
(7 September 2007)

Ideas of abstraction 
New York's Esso Gallery in Chelsea's West 26th Street, is holding a second solo exhibition by Auckland artist Julian Dashper. Titled The Abstract Office, the exhibition is a broad survey of Dashper's work from 1992 to 2007, featuring both sculptures and paintings. According to Esso Gallery, "Dashper's work focuses on the histories, theories and more general or popular ideas of abstraction ... The geographical positioning of New Zealand globally and how this country receives and disseminates visual information is also a core subject in [his] work." Dashper's work was recently the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, curated by Christopher Cook and David Raskin, that toured America's midwest. The Abstract Office show at Esso Gallery runs from May 24 to June 23. 
(May 2007)

Lyrical minimalism in Aotearoa 
The latest instalment in US artist Chip Hooper's ongoing series of ocean photographs is New Zealand's South Pacific and Tasman Sea. Hooper's solo exhibition of silver prints opens on March 29 at New York's Robert Mann Gallery, where he showed his first collection California's Pacific in 2004. Robert Mann: "[Hooper] continues to perfect his approach to photographing the ocean, steadily refining his sense of lyrical minimalism, as in Toward Dunedin, South Pacific, 2003, where a horizon of dark water is broken by the low, jagged line of distant mountains, or in Cape Foulwind Beach, Tasman Sea, 2003, where a monolithic cliff rises beyond the frame." 
(March 2007)

NZ connection in artUS 
ArtUS magazine featured reviews of two exhibitions by NZ artists in its February edition: Michael Parekowhai at Sydney's Roslyn Oxley Gallery and Simon Reece's High Tide exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Formerly known as Art & Text, ArtUS changed its name when founding editor Paul Foss moved from his native Australia to Los Angeles in the late 1990s. As Wellington-based art blog Over the Net notes, "When he was editor of Art & Text, Paul Foss always gave New Zealand art good space." It looks like he means to carry on as he started. 
(5 February 2007)

Master of noir 
The newfound appreciation of NZ-born artist James Boswell continues, with a second feature in the Guardian. The article focuses on Boswell's post-WW2 illustrations for film posters, commissioned by Ealing studio's head of marketing S James Woods. "My father was absolutely chuffed with [the commissions]," says his daughter Sally. "S John Woods was an amazing man, and had an ability to understand that he could create astonishing works of art as posters. So he just went to his artist friends. Of which my father was one, luckily." Boswell's poster for the British noir classic It Always Rains on Sunday is currently on display at the Tate Britain. 
(5 January 2007)

Exploration of light 
NZ art luminary Bill Culbert staged his second solo exhibition "Black and Light" at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Soundan Lane, Sydney. "In this exhibition, Culbert uses the three-dimensional form of fluorescent lights and flat, matt-black lines to highlight the often unquestioned relationship between black and light - where they are viewed as endpoints to each other, extreme opposites, rather than being part of the same visible realm," says curator Naomi Evans. The exhibition ran 2-27 May.
(2-27 May 2006)

Three more for the C.V. 
Edge artist Julian Dashper continues to make inroads in the US, after his 2001 Fulbright residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. His first solo show in New York (at the Esso Gallery) consists of two works - Future Call and Untitled (C.V). Dashper's work is also the subject of a major 25 year retrospective presently touring the US, organised by the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa and co-curated by Sioux City curator Christopher Cook and art historian/writer David Raskin. It marks the first ever American museum retrospective of a resident NZ artist. Finally, Art Asia Pacific magazine features a six-page spread on Dashper in its Winter 2006 issue. AAP: "Dashper's conceptual art can be spoken on the phone, mailed, sent by email or courier, carried as hand luggage on a plane, made on-site by the artist or by someone other than the artist - all actions/qualities that allow him to overcome the isolation of NZ … his is truly art for the information age."
(10 March 2006)

Capital meditation 
Wallpaper magazine takes a look at the city-scapes of Wellington through the lens of legendary American photographer Stephen Shore - who had three pictures acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York at age 14 and went on to become the first living photographer to have a one man show at the Met in 1971. Shore's photographic essay features Lambton Quay, Oriental Bay, the southern coastline and Miramar backstreets. Shore's perspectives are dramatic and unexpected, casting the city in a fresh new light and accompanied by some unconventional traveler observations on Wellington shopping, entertainment, excursions and eateries. "There's something about the Pacific Rim that seems to make its big cities go either one of two ways. They either become sprawling corporate behemoths sucking in immigrants, dealmakers and chancers…or they go boho. In New Zealand, Auckland has taken the first route leaving Wellington, with the latte-slurping, grunge image. The multi-coloured wooden houses tumbling down the steep ravines to a dramatic natural harbour have only reinforced the Bay area comparisons. Add a whiff of Tolkein thanks to hirsute local resident Peter Jackson, and you could be forgiven for writing off Wellington as the world's southernmost hippy city. But that would be oversimplifying the city."
(October 2005)

Message in a vessel
NZ sculptor Roger Thompson is one of 400 artists from 65 different countries exhibiting at the second annual Beijing International Art Biennale. His Cultural Vessels/Amphoric Triptych is a collection of three containers representing the myriad aspects making up NZ’s cultural history. “The remote geography of NZ is explored through sailing ships, waves, the sea, the rhythm of the music, a Maori cross, the manaia, a pacific fish hook, a fishing net, umbrella, spirals, koru - the unfolding fern leaf of growth,” he says. In 2003, Thomas was invited by the Changchun International Sculpture Conference to make a piece for the local sculpture garden - Turangawaewae New Zealand (pictured above).
(23 September 2005)

Coming to America
The largest exhibition of Maori art ever to show in the US opened at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts on August 4. Entitled Toi Maori – Art from the Maori People, the exhibition combines traditional taonga and contemporary works, with a special focus on weaving and ta moko. The historic event opened with a dawn ceremony, in which a fully manned waka was paddled through the Golden Gate Bridge and on to the beach at Maritime Park, where it was greeted by representatives of the area’s own “first people,” the Ohlone. The exhibition will also be shown in Oregon and Washington State.
(7 August 2005)
   

Dinosaurs in the Domain
An Aucklander story featured on international Alt News website, Rense. ‘Mystery creature roams Auckland park,’ turned out to be a tongue-in-cheek promotion of the Auckland Museum’s new dinosaur models in the surrounding Domain.
(30 June 2005)

Winner by invitation
Peter Boggs won Australia’s most esteemed drawing prize, the Kedumba Drawing Award, in late October. He was selected from a field of 24 contemporary artists to win the invitation-only award, which is now in its 15th year. Boggs has also been invited to show his Boboli Gardens series at the annual Maggio Musicale Fiorentino festival in Florence next year. A former student of Colin McCahon, Boggs describes his work as “an ongoing exploration of form and composition . . . The subjects are in the main simple forms and careful arrangements, invested with mystery, silence and hopefully some poetry, and out of that with luck, comes a sense of quiet introspection and contemplation.”
(7 November 2004)

Edge to the curve
NZ artists Claire Hammon and Nadia Hunt took part in the inaugural Curvy Exhibition, organised by Australia's Yen magazine and M-One-11 clothing. Curvy was set up to promote the best of female design worldwide -  encompassing illustration, graffiti, photography, graphics, and animation. After its opening in Sydney, Curvy will show in Auckland, London, LA, Tokyo, Toronto, Milan, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore and Sao Paulo. The exhibition is also available in book form (pictured above).
(June 2004)

History goes digital
New York Times reviews ‘Paradise Now,’ a diverse exhibition of contemporary NZ and Pacific art currently on show at the Asia Pacific Society Museum on Park Avenue. Lisa Reihana’s multiple-screen digital video installation, Native Portraits n.19897, is identified as the show’s “standout.” In the piece, Reihana and friends assume different roles and costumes to re-enact (and re-work) the 19th century studio photographs of Maori individuals and families. Says the Times reviewer, “A beautifully executed examination of the intricacies, intimacies, manipulations and betrayals that underlie relationships built on colonialism, Ms. Reihana's piece is highly specific, universally applicable and utterly legible. However, it is far from the only reason to visit this instructive exhibition.”
(5 March 2004)

Top shots
The photographer who captured Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mt Everest hosts a retrospective at Lab X in Melbourne. Alfred Gregory documented Hillary and Tenzing’s feat in a series of images that became recognised throughout the world, the most famous showing Hillary and Tenzing approaching the summit, jokingly renamed “Hillary and Tenzing on top”. The exclusive rights to the images and story were bought by The Times for £20 000, a triumph for the paper as well as for Kodak who supplied the cameras and film that captured the famous shots. The exhibition images have been selected by Gregory from his personal collection and have been reprinted on Kodak’s new Endura paper.

Noiseworks
Houston Press reviews an exhibition by edge conceptual artist Julian Dashper at the Texas Gallery. ‘Unique Records’ is a collection of art-shrine sound-bites amassed during Dashper’s travels and presented on transparent vinyl discs. On Dashper's aural art: "the cover of Blue Circles reveals that it was ‘Recorded in front of Jackson Pollock's ‘Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952,’ 7th January 2002 Canberra, Australia’ […] What in all likelihood contains the sounds of a museum guard's creaking shoes or the cacophony of a school group could potentially harbour drama - a domestic dispute exacerbated by abstract expressionist art or perhaps international espionage plotted under the cover of a public place. Maybe it is just long minutes of awkward and reverential museum silence interrupted by the occasional ‘My kid could do that.’”
(6 November 2003)

Taranaki to Toronto
Gregory Burke has been appointed to the position of Director, The Power Plant Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre Toronto commencing September 2005. A native New Zealander, Gregory Burke is currently Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the New Plymouth contemporary art gallery presenting international exhibitions with a focus on countries of the Pacific Rim. The gallery is home to the foundation and collection of Len Lye, the New Zealand artist recognized for his pioneering experimental films and for his kinetic sculpture. Burke is a curator, writer, editor and arts manager. He is the Commissioner for the 2005 New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, editor of the contemporary art magazine VISIT and spent three years as Manager, Arts Development/ Arts Advisor to the Arts Council of New Zealand with responsibility for visual arts, crafts, design arts, film and new media.

You make me feel I'm [not] really there 
NZ’s Jacqueline Fraser has made the shortlist for the inaugural Artes Mundi (the Wales International Visual Art Prize), which at ₤40,000, is the largest award made to an individual artist in the UK. The award aims to profile artists working on the human form and presence and to “encourage international debate and exchange between diverse cultures and countries.” An exhibition of work by the 10 short-listed artists, including Fraser's work (entitled “INVISIBLE «My fur cossack hat enhances my look» «prozac»”) is to be held at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in Cardiff next year with the winner to be announced in late March. 
(15 September 2003)
  

When, will I, will I be famous
SMH art critic Peter Hill muses on art, fame and celebrity, praising the playful personas of NZ artist Patrick Pound. He compares Pound to English YBA chief Damien Hirst: "For a decade he has been working on a systematic parody of the modern artist's mania for curriculum vitae. [...] As with all good superfictions, he mixes reality with art, culture with business. Pound is currently co-currating the show, 'The Way things Are' at Redfern's Grant Pirrie Gallery, featuring his: 'Other Artists: The Artists that I could Have Been' which includes "The artist working under the name Charles Ransom. At each of her solo shows she would simply send one of her severed fingers and a note demanding payment in order to stop this perverse performance of a career". "Warhol would be turning silver with envy", Hill remarks.
(30 - 31 August 2003)
       

Land of the long black shadow
The Stedelijk Museum curated Colin McCahon retrospective - 'A Question of Faith' - reviewed in the Weekend Australian, prior to its opening at the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne's Federation Square. Critic Susan McCulloch: "The messages - and indeed the images - of many of McCahon's works may seem to offer an impossibly bleak view. Yet their pared-back grandeur and sheer boldness of sign-making lifts them into a timeless dimension." McCulloch lauds McCahon as one of Australasia's brilliant abstractionists "whose uncompromising individual paintings were underpinned by a deeply felt sense of place." 
(19 July 2003)
     

Glamour girls
A photographic exhibition by NZ artist Fiona Clark is creating a stir at Sydney's Mori Gallery. Go Girl - a series of portraits of NZ's transgender and transvestite community - is described in the Herald as "variously provocative, defiant and flirtatious … marvellously honest and beautifully composed images." Most of the portraits were taken during 1974-5, at the 'Gay Lib Dance Party,' 'Miss NZ Drag Queen Ball,' and Auckland's Mojo club.
(24 June 2003)

A man of wealth and taste: Harry M. Miller
"Should the job go to the vulgar New Zealander who had brought the Rolling Stones to Australia?" Sydney icon, edge arts patron and tour promoter, Harry M. Miller is celebrated in a profile that lauds his achievements as chairman of the Art Gallery Society of NSW, as the institution celebrates its 50th anniversary. Miller, who took the helm in 1972, is credited with turning "what was once the province of the wealthy and the dead into a thriving and much-loved Australian cultural icon, which is admired around the world."
(23 May 2003)
    

Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship
The M.I.L.K photography exhibition - initiated by NZ publisher Geoff Blackwell - recently opened at Federation Square, Melbourne. The works have already shown at New York's Grand Central Station, London's Science Museum and the Sydney Opera House, and have been translated into a globally best-selling series of books and stationary. 
(13 March 2003)

Shopping with Billy Apple
Ground-breaking NZ artist Billy Apple featured in The Tate Liverpool's Shopping exhibition. Apple's work appeared alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray and Andy Warhol in a retrospective of "a century of art and consumer culture." Apple's 1964 American Supermarket collaboration with Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Robert Watts, featured in the famous Life magazine pop-art spread, was at the vanguard of the movement.
(20 December - 23 March 2002)
  

A fond farewell
Washington Post pays tribute to Donald McCarten, the NZ-born former art director of US News & World Report magazine. McCarten studied art in NZ and London before moving into graphic design in the US. On retiring from US News in 1988 he set up a freelance design company and began exhibiting his landscape paintings around America. He died March 12, aged 73.
(17 March 2003)
  

Venice bound 
Christchurch sculptor Francis Upritchard and Auckland painter and teacher Judy Millar will represent New Zealand in a six-month exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Upritchard is known for her hand-made figures inspired by the works of medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, while Millar makes large-scale, abstract paintings. In 2006, London-based Upritchard won the Walters Prize for her installation of sculpture entitled 'Doomed Doomed Doomed'. Creative NZ arts council chairman Alastair Carruthers has described Judy Millar as "one of New Zealand's most experienced abstractionists" and her project for Venice as "strong, bold and exciting". This is the fourth Biennale New Zealand has exhibited at. 
(25 June 2008)

Lange's working class

Shadows at Pataka 
Porirua's Pataka Museum is building on ties with the American Haille Ford Museum in an exhibition of North American Indian prints called 'Crow's Shadows', put on in conjunction with Wellington's International Festival of the Arts. Curator of the exhibition, American Rebecca Dobkins first connected with indigenous people from New Zealand when she curated a Hallie Ford exhibition of Maori weaving in the 2005 Toi Maori: The Eternal Thread, which saw Maori weavers demonstrating at the museum. Pataka says they are expecting thousands of visitors for the exhibit, which offers the widest range of work by Native American artists seen in New Zealand for more than a decade. The show opened February 16 and runs through June 8. 
(24 February 2008)

Finn unpacked 
Auckland artist Martin Ball's portrait of singer Neil Finn is up for Australia's most prestigous art award, the Archibald Prize. Ball won the Archibald Packing Room prize, selected annually by backroom staff at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney. It is one of 700 entries for the Archibald Prize, which will be announced on March 7. The winning artist said he picked Neil Finn as a subject because "he has an interesting face, I like his music and he is an iconic figure in Australasia." Ball studied at the University of Auckland's School of Fine Arts and completed a Masters degree there in 2001. 
(28 February 2008)

Pseudonym on show 
Auckland artist et al.'s installation altruistic studies features at the world renowned Swiss exhibition Art Basel 39 in June. Et al. won New Zealand's prestigious Walters Prize in 2003 for restricted access. She is presented at the exhibition by Karangahape Road gallery, Starkwhite. Art Basel is the world's premier international art showcase for modern and contemporary art and includes leading galleries and artists from around the globe. Fifty-five thousand attended last year's Art Basel 38. 
(14 February 2008)

A painter's painter 
NZ-born artist Peter Boggs has just wrapped up a critically acclaimed exhibition at Canberra's Beaver Galleries. Canberra Times critic Sasha Grishin compares Boggs to Giorgio Morandi and Edward Hopper, and describes his latest works as "marvellous meditations on space, structure and geometry". Boggs was taught by Colin McCahon at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, and has lived in Australia for the past 20 years. Often described as a painter's painter, his pieces are distinguished by their subdued colour palettes, clean lines and sense of mystery. "I've always liked the idea of a painting containing something which the eye can't see," he once commented, "What's lurking outside the frame." 
(10 November 2007)

Master carver shares message 
Maori master carver James Rickard held a workshop at the Victor Oteyza Community Art Space in Baguio City, the Philippines, this month. He spoke about the need for indigenous artists to protect their works from globalisation, encouraging the Asin carvers in attendance to "meet it [globalisation] at your own terms, your own price, and at your own time". Rickard has been a Maori master carver for 34 years and currently teaches at the Te Puia Wananga Whakairo woodcarving school. His tour of the Philippines has so far encompassed Paete, Laguna and Asin. "Some of us have gone to North America," he says, "but I want to come to Asia where our ancestry begins." 
(10 October 2007)

Unseen Fiji in print 
A new book by Wellington documentary photographer Bruce Connew featured in Time magazine's Pacific edition. Stopover tells the story of Fiji's Indian sugar-cane workers - the country's "unseen underclass" - in stunning black and white images. After Fiji's first ethnic Indian prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, was deposed in 2000, Connew began making regular trips to the country's sugar district, documenting the day-to-day lives of its inhabitants. The 60 images from Stopover are on display at Porirua's Pataka museum and gallery until November 25. 
(14 September 2007)

At home in Chelsea 
Works by NZ artist Lisa Ferguson feature in the ID Please group show currently on at the Heidi Cho Gallery in New York's renowned Chelsea gallery district. Her bold, large-scale pieces are described as "wildly colorful and freely formed" on the gallery's website. Ferguson is steadily carving a name for herself in New York, where she has been based since March 2006. Her recent commissions include an exclusive series of works for the new Atelier luxury condominium development in Manhattan. ID Please runs until August 10. 
(12 July 2007)

NZ painter in online art showdown 
Nelson-born artist Charles Olsen is one of 12 finalists in the UK-based Saatchi Showdown, established by art collector and impresario Charles Saatchi. Olsen's oil painting 'La Sundari', a portrait of a flamenco dancer on large wooden shutters, won its initial round in the viewer-voted online competition, and has now entered the final knockout phase. Olsen has been based in Madrid for the past four years, where he runs Myspace pages promoting NZ and Spanish artists: 'Aotearoa Artists' and 'Artistas de España'. "For me painting a portrait, accompanying a flamenco dancer with the guitar, learning a new language, or organising an exhibition, all challenge me personally in different ways and trying to increase my chances in this competition is just another challenge," he said of the Saatchi Showdown. The overall winner is announced August 26. 
(18 August 2007)

Australia, meet Reg 
The first full-length documentary on NZ-born artist Chris O'Doherty (AKA Reg Mombassa) screened on Australia's SBS in May. Golden Sandals: The Art of Reg Mombassa explores the links between the artist's NZ upbringing, suburban landscape art and iconic surrealist work for surfwear label, Mambo. "I am always disturbed by films that tell us about the artist. I wanted it to be of the artist," says filmmaker Haydn Keenan, who took a more personalised approach by mixing traditional interviews with quirky animated sequences featuring classic Mombassa characters such as the Australian Jesus. Mombassa describes the film as "an archeological suburban dig" and admires Keenan's unconventional documentary style: "In a lot of art documentaries it is just the artist sitting there talking." 
(2 May 2007)

Hunter retains her edge 
NZ-born Alexis Hunter features in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art. Hunter moved to London in 1972 aged 24 and has lived and worked there ever since. Her single contribution to the show is a six-panel, 25-ft long painting called The Objects Series (1974-75), depicting anonymous male torsos in striking detail. The Objects Series is name-checked by the LA Times as one of three reasons to visit the sprawling exhibition, which comprises 430 works by 119 artists. LA Times: "This sexy work appears startlingly fresh, almost as if it could have been made today ... Thanks to the beautifully rendered Photorealist style, a lush assertion of feminine power enhances the erotic edge of its otherwise masculine imagery." Wack! runs from March 4 to July 16.
(29 April 2007)

Real achievement 
Dunedin artist Peter Lyons has found critical and commercial success in the US after being "discovered" while working as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Lyons' strikingly rendered rural and urban landscapes have seen him compared to realist masters Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Caspar David Friedrich in the American art press. The 46-year-old self-taught artist had seldom exhibited his paintings prior to 2001; his works now hang in such esteemed galleries as Boston's St Botolph Club and the Richard York Gallery in New York, where they sell for tens of thousands of dollars. "If you've really got this thing and the passion for it, just get out there, the hell with it," he said in an interview with Wellington's Dominion Post. "What I did - you don't need money to do it, you need that passion." Lyons' next show is in two months time at the Meredith Ward Fine Arts gallery in New York.
(5 March 2007)

San Diegans fall for NZ designs
Christine Nottingham and Andrea Peach have opened a gallery-cum-store in San Diego to showcase designs by established and emerging artists from their native NZ. Moana Design on Solana Beach features works by glass artists Peter Viesnik, Garry Nash and Hoglund Art Glass, ceramists Gill Gane, Peter Faulkner and Peter Stewart, wood turner Ian Blackwell and jewellers Neal Hanna and Graeme Wylie. "I always thought some of the bright colors of New Zealand fine art went really well in San Diego and the climate," says Nottingham, who cites Peter Stewart as the top selling designer on their books. 
(4 January 2007)

On show in Soho 
Out From Down Under and Beyond: an Exhibition of Fine Art from Australia and New Zealand is currently showing at the Agora Gallery in Soho, New York. Helga Windle (pictured) from Buller, West Coast, who "merges Symbolist imagery and Expressionist energy in her starkly simplified oils," is one of the NZ artists exhibiting. Another is Samoan-born, Wellington resident Anna Crawley, whose paintings, in the words of gallery director Angela Di Bellow, "exhibit strength, with radiant forms emerging and dissolving out of equally radiant ground." According to the gallery's press release, "the best artists from [this] part of the world combine a sense of national identity with a quirky originality … it is high time that we began to regard the art of Australia and NZ in general as important ingredients in the eclectic mix of contemporary painting." 
(4 May 2006)

Barr & Barr
Wellington curators and strategists Jim Barr and Mary Barr head the survey by London art magazine Contemporary of 21 international collectors. An essay by William McAloon features work by Ronnie Van Hout, et al, Michael Parekowhai, Michael Stevenson, Peter Robinson, Rose Nolan and Frances Upritchard, and references collected artists from Europe, Japan and America. “Connections and counterpoints abound – local/global, high-tech/homespun.” The video dimension of the collection is highlighted by the work of French artist Nicolas Jasmin showing an actor venting his rage while locked out of his car in an urban wasteland. “For the Barrs, “it summed up a tough 20th century in 59 seconds.”” Reboot – a selection of works from the collection, will be an exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in August 2006, further underlining the Barrs’ commitment to showing and sharing cutting-edge art from New Zealand and the world.

Art in New Zealand 
October's Art in America features a "Report from New Zealand" by Richard Kalina, examining New Zealand artists and their work as well as the art history and institutions of the country. The prestigious publication explores our art in the context of New Zealand focusing its search for cultural and economic identity less in the British Commonwealth and more on the Pacific edge and the corresponding shift that is beginning to be felt. The full survey features Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Rosalie Gascoigne, Sara Hughes, Max Gimblett, Lauren Lysaght, Judy Millar, Peter Peryer and Michael Parekowhai. "The future of art in New Zealand feels open-ended, animated by a strong sense of optimism. Far away from the art centers of North America and Europe, the country is also far from Australia. Its artists however, are well travelled, and the institutional support system is strong…New Zealand enjoys an undisputed place in the society of forward-thinking developed nations, and it sustains an artistic production very much in keeping with that position."
(October 2005)

Biennale buzz
Art collective et al is New Zealand’s representative at the Venice Biennale with its installation The Fundamental Practice. Central to et al.’s work is an exploration of the human tendency to establish truths and orthodoxies in response to the ‘unknown’. It is a concern that is reflected in et al.’s long-standing choice not to reveal their identities. The group is currently steered by one artist who remains anonymous outside the title et al., thereby protecting her own mutability, and the homogeny of the group. Te Papa curator explains in the NZ Listener  how and why et al's controversial installation was one of the buzzes of the 2005 Venice Biennale. 
(16 July 2005)

Brothers in arts
Cheyene Emery, Lisa Bartlett, and Marie Panapa of Te Wananga o Aotearoa (University of NZ) travelled to Sante Fe to take part in an international arts exchange with the Institute of American Indian Arts. According to Panapa, “There were similarities (in the art.) Suddenly the world seems like a tiny, tiny little planet.” Four IAIA students learned about Maori art in NZ last year.
(15 October 2004)
    

Rick Rudd, noteworthy ceramicist
Taipei Times praises NZ potter Rick Rudd’s “heavenly wares” in a review of his exhibition at Page One's Taipei 101 store. “Rudd does not label his wares, preferring instead for the viewer to provide a meaning for the work. He is keener on discovering the possibilities of form rather than finding inspiration from nature. Rudd has used the line himself and it is apt: True to form rather than nature. It is this focus that makes him not just a studio potter, but a ceramicist of note.”
(1 August 2004)

Garland Coma
New Zealand-born political cartoonist for the Daily Telegraph since 1966, Nicholas Garland has provided 40 woodcut illustrations for the new Novela by son Alex "The Beach" Garland. The book describes the dream-like interior life of a man left permanently semi-conscious after being beaten up on a train. Garland senior, now knighted, drew the original satirical comic strip The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie for Private Eye in the 1960s.
(27 June 2004)

Now wear this
Boston Globe profiles Nelson’s World of Wearable Art (WOW), which has grown “from a soggy one-night affair in a tent 16 years ago to become one of New Zealand's iconic arts events, selling out 2,500 seats nightly.” According to the Globe, the “avian frenzy” at the 2003 awards – typified by the Bizarre Bra’s winning entry, ‘Budgerigar Bra’ - put Bjork’s swan-draped get-up at that year's Oscars to shame.
(24 December 2003)
    

Finely sculpted prose
Michael Dunn's New Zealand Sculpture: A History praised as "a fine production ... readable and informative" in Art Monthly Australia's book review issue. Dunn's comprehensive historical overview is the first of its kind published in NZ, "an encouragingly substantial, if traditional treatment of a subject which (as all recognise, including the author), is seldom dealt with in the ways allowed for with painting." Dunn is Professor and Head of Department at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland.
(October 2003)
  

A world in pictures
British photojournalist, Joan Wakelin, died on September 23 aged 75. Wakelin is best known for her images of Sri Lankan boat-people, Australian Aboriginal and NZ Maori communities; the latter with which she had a special connection. She lectured on the photography of NZ people and landscapes as a guest of the government in the 1980s and 90s.
(29 October 2003)
   

Glass master #2
NZ glass artist, Luke Jacomb, is turning heads in Seattle with his pioneering use of photosensitive glass. While the product itself was invented during WW2, Jacomb is believed to be the first artist to incorporate it into his work. In his most recent exhibition, Jacomb created a link between photosensitivity and photosynthesis by using a recurring leaf motif. Says the 26-year-old; “I have a whole lifetime of ideas ahead of me. This is just the start.”
(16 September 2003)
  

Brake continues to be benchmark
Australian photojournalist Paul Blackmore is compared to late great NZ photographer, Brian Brake, in a review by the Herald. Blackmore's Waters images are reminiscent of Brake's Monsoon series - "one of the most successful photo essays of all time." Monsoon, a vivid exploration of the meaning of water to an Indian village in 1961, was published in every major magazine from Paris Match to LIFE.
(15 August 2003)
 

The name game
NZ pop-art exponent, Billy Apple (nee Barry George Bates,) listed alongside Odd Nerdrum, Hercules Fisherman, and Seymour Likely as one of the "unbeatable names in the art world." Buy Billy Apple in the Edge emporium.
(1 August 2003)
   

4WD Bellissima!
Contemporary artist Michael Stevenson is representing NZ at the 50th Venice Biennale 2003 - the oldest and most prestigious art event in the world. Described by the NZ Selection Committee as "a passionate archivist of our culture," Stevenson is currently NZ's artist-in-residence at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The work he has created for the Biennale - 'This is the Trekka' - brings together social, economic, and art history in the shape of a restored Trekka car parked inside an 18th century cathedral and surrounded by NZ Dairy Board butter cartons. The Biennale runs from June to November this year.
(June - November 2003)
   

KTV: Kinetic Television
Work by pioneering NZ filmmaker, artist, kinetic sculpter and general 'crazy guy', Len Lye, is featured in the exhibition ' A Century of Artists' Film in Britain' at the Tate Britain. Lye's 1930s work is spliced with such modern-day video virtuosos as Chris Cunningham and Aphex Twin, and Peter Greenaway. Lye's films are widely regarded as precursors to the modern music video, and have recently been screened on MTV Europe.
(19 May 2003)
 

Capturing the uncanny
Works by Wellington based artist Pippa Sanderson are currently on show at Edmonton's Harcourt House Gallery. Her exhibition, The (Un)heimlich Manoeuvre, references Victorian Spiritualism, haunted houses, and Gothic cinematic aesthetics. Shot on film well past its use-by date, her images "have a dreamy, fuzzy feel to them as recognizable objects and architectural features blur into abstract blobs of colour and flashes of light."
(9 May 2003)
   

Octopus's garden
Work by NZ artist Ani O'Neill is currently on show at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art as part of an exhibition exploring artistic interaction with the ocean, Liquid Sea, alongside Doug Aitken, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Joan Brassil and Elisa Sighicelli. SMH: "Liquid Sea crosses a biennale of art with an episode of ABC TV's Quantum." The MCA, perched on the harbour edge, is "a venue fit for Ani O'Neill's artfully crocheted octopus, presiding impertinently over Opera House views."
(14 March 2003)
   

Give up your day job?
Otago-born Peter Lyons has the attention of the American art world, with shows scheduled for Manhattan's Richard York Gallery and the St Botolph Club in Boston. The 42-year-old security guard works nights at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts; by day he creates "eerie, luminous landscapes […] with the mystical stillness and celestial light of Vermeer." An entirely self-taught artist, Lyons is being compared to realist masters Charles Sheeler and Caspar David Friedrich.
(12 February 2003)
   

"Freewheeling, irrepressibility & incoherence."
Pioneer of postmodernist NZ art, Richard Killeen, featured in Art Asia Pacific. Killeen's recent works revisit the "cut-out" form with which made his name in the late 70's. Deceptively simple in appearance, the works carry a wealth of social significance: "Killeen seems interested in the excessive, uncontrollable nature of the visual message. His fixation with incorporating images within other images reiterates the question about how ideas are disseminated - how things 'get in'."
(October - December 2002)
            

Pacific terrific
NZ artists Lisa Reihana, Ralph Hotere, and the "Pasifika Divas" will be exhibiting at the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. The exhibition brings together artists from Japan to Australia to Aotearoa, and opens September 12 with the "bombastic and sexy" divas storming across the Tasman for an opening night of Pacific body adornment, and design. 
(August 2002)
 

Earthworks
Ceramic work by New Zealand artist Edith Slee was on show at the Balance House in Glenavy. The "Dwelling" exhibition featured 150 pieces made of earth from her native Otago and clay from the Thames as well as found objects gathered from the foreshore. These pieces are a way of "honouring the land we live in".
(20 June 2002)
              

Skin Deep
Ta moko retrospectively finds its way into an icon of colonialism: the museum. The Skin Deep exhibition at Britain's National Maritime Museum, traces the development and diversity of tattoo over the last two hundred years. Featuring the work of Te Rangitu Netana (personal engraver to Robbie Williams), and attracting notice: from the knowing and smooth: "a retrospective of fleshy couture" (New Statesman), to post-colonial sensitivity in The Times: "a short film made in New Zealand reveals how these native cultures are now reclaiming the designs that were so long repressed: fairs and festivals are devoted to the art, and there’s even a return to the use of the traditional hammer and chisel." See the NZEDGE Hot piece on Ta Moko.
(26 March 2002)
 

East side story
The famously diffuse art scene in LA seems to have finally found a centre, with galleries and artists increasingly coalescing around the east-side regions of Highland Park and Mount Washington. Much of the east-side's new white-hot status is being attributed to New Zealand artist and curator Giovanni Intra, proprietor of the influential gallery China Art Objects.
(November 2001)
           

Praise for Jewish Museum
Praise keeps coming for the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the exhibition curated by Kiwis Ken Gorbey and Nigel Cox. Gorbey and Cox realise that sympathy-inducing gimmicks are pathetically unequal to the gravity of the task, but that the exhibition has to be challenging to its audience. "We are not going to be a Disneyland," vows Gorbey, "but we are going to use up-to-date techniques."
(27 September 2001)
       

Art Attack in Basel
Influential art journal Art Forum notes a first time edge presence at the Liste 01 Young Art Fair in Basel. Wellington's Hamish Mckay Gallery showcased artists including Ricky Swallow, Michael Harrison, Ronnie van Hout and Gavin Hipkins. 

Ricky Swallow
Apple 2000 (2000)
pigmented resin and wire