Column | Mark Amery: Visual Arts

By Mark Amery

Music and memory are close companions. Personal moments can come flooding back at the sight of an album cover. Yet the way we listen to music has shifted continually in recent decades, from the 45 record through to the MP3. Boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, which even to look at come embedded with emotion and rich with histories, have often been consigned to the garage. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Word of mouth remains the world’s most powerful PR, and I can’t recall hearing stronger or more diverse in my ear than for Paperskin: The Art of Tapa Cloth, currently on show at Te Papa. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Printmaking and painting used to go more hand in hand. Painters worked with printers to produce limited edition prints and works on paper, many bringing distinctive ideas into printmaking which saw them acclaimed in this media in its own right. Ralph Hotere is a classic example. Read More »

By Mark Amery

On Saturday, alongside other strangers, I had the pleasure in the name of art of taking a sledgehammer and axe to James R Ford’s cursed black Nissan Primera. As widely reported he’d bought the vehicle off Trade Me and it had caused him nothing but trouble. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Just when I’d started to despair about not seeing spreads of fresh artwork from New Zealand’s up and comers in Wellington, this year has felt like something of a circuit breaker. Read More »

New York artist Gregory Sholette is currently in Wellington on a residency at Enjoy Gallery. Through the work he’s been making with local artists, open discussions, and a public seminar this weekend on collaborative art practice, he’s providing context and inspiration for artists here, says Mark Amery. Read More »

By Mark Amery

With Surrealism and Dada as the glorious exceptions, it often feels like 20th century art had a humour bypass. All furrowed brows, pushing art relentlessly forwards across troubled times.

By the 1990s however art was looking back on itself with a wit laced with strong doses of irony. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The title Community Garden, for a show of four Wellington artists at Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, conjures up images of artists heading downtown to potter around their plots, share gossip in the potting sheds and come out cradling prized creations. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Dealer galleries tend to take two different approaches to introducing new artists to their stables of represented artists. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Think of the city’s public spaces as a garden. As well as a network of paths, our public spaces provide for contemplation, recreation, social interaction, and the congregation of smokers. They are the places we need to take breaks, recharge, and have fresh experiences in. And that need is only going to get greater. Read More »

Mark Amery reviews exhibitions by emerging contemporary Maori artists showing in Wellington, including Leilani Kake’s moving three-part documentary video work Tino Rangatira Tanga.

"It’s an intimate portrait of her father and whanau, and illustration of the enduring strength and relevance of waiata, korero, ta moko and tikanga Maori.” Read More »

Mark Amery reviews portraiture from the Adam Portrait Award show and beyond.

"Part of the reason for the great popularity of portrait galleries is our interest in how well known faces are portrayed." Read More »

By Mark Amery

The visual arts programme of the NZ International Arts Festival has been a modest one. Big international coups like Yayoi Kusama have been and gone and the opportunity to draw new pathways through the city through temporary work, and bring together the city’s bevy of galleries at a time when the city is humming have largely gone begging. Read More »

Mark Amery says restaging New Zealand's contribution to the Venice Biennale back home is 'akin to putting ships in bottles.'

"The works were envisioned for a historic church and a palace. That said, these are strong exhibitions thoughtfully reconfigured for a new space." Read More »

By Mark Amery

Degas did ballet dancers, Frances Hodgkins farming implements, but I can't think of any artist who has more monopolized one single subject matter than Michael Hight. Read More »

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By Mark Amery

With summer seemingly cancelled for the Wellington region, TheNewDowse’s programme in Lower Hutt has been one true hot spot. It’s inspiring to enter an art museum full of adults and children engaging with bright, adventurous art and design that feels very much of its cultural moment. Read More »

By Mark Amery

2009 was the year we got to see what Wellington looks like without City Gallery, with our major contemporary art institution closed for most of the year for a major extension.

City Gallery’s absence emphasised the impressive array of visual arts activity happening beyond it. Read More »

By Mark Amery

For over ten years Photospace in Courtenay Place has been providing a home for photographers. The only gallery dedicated to photography in Wellington it’s big on inclusiveness, steered by a dynamo of a man with a keen eye and a passionate advocate for photographers, James Gilberd. Read More »

By Mark Amery

If just as likely to be labeled borderline psychotic as psychic, artists have nevertheless often been seen as able to unlock the doors of perception to the unknown, the unseen and the inexplicable. To dabble in the mysteries. To make visible that beyond what we usually see. Read More »

By Mark Amery

To see an excellent example of how some dealer galleries are increasingly behaving like public ones, cross the road from City Gallery to Page Blackie off Chews Lane. Read More »

By Mark Amery

This month there’s an impressive array of contemporary Maori art practice on display in the Wellington region. Read More »

By Mark Amery

No matter the advances in digital technology, your travel snaps are always going to disappoint. They require your personal animation to convey the perception of what it was like to experience a strange foreign landscape. Read More »

By Mark Amery

While writers seem to get away with writing one great novel or play in five, we seem to have a terrible propensity to write off a visual artist based on a single encounter. Read More »

By Mark Amery 

Art doesn’t capture a moment in time, like a snapshot or a document. It’s about the fluidity of time, the sensations surrounding the memory of moments; the sense of life flowing from the past through the present and into the future. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Sandwiched in between music venue San Francisco Bathhouse and a vegetarian restaurant in Cuba Street, the South Coast Gallery is a slender wee slip of a salon. It provides an inner city base for a gallery that has already gained a solid reputation for its representation of an eclectic range of interesting artists. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The expression to “kick against the pricks”, originates in the bible and can be defined to mean to fight against authority. That’s quite a natural activity of artists, looking to engender debate and breath new air into things. Yet there’s also every sign at present that art institutions - often those kicked against - also want in on exploring what that kicking right now might mean. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It’s no wonder that artists are increasingly turning to reuse objects as a basis for art. Everyday, society is asking us to look harder at the piles of inorganic packaging and furniture that surround us, leading to us rather guiltily consider their contribution to our future on the planet. Read More »

By Mark Amery - Originally published in Massey Research Magazine, 2008

Consider if you will the camera as a gate. A gate providing access to other worlds through the walls that bound our current experience of the world. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It doesn’t seem so long ago that video art was treated like the grubby, fuzzy unsaleable black sheep of the fine art family. In these days of the DVD projector and widescreen you’re now expected to have a good artistic reason for littering a gallery with trails of cords and an assortment of second hand TV monitors. Read More »